How Psychwire Used Google Ads to Drive 61% of Business Growth and Expand Into 60 New Markets

Challenges

Then the largest growth market shook. The US Department of Health and Human Services briefly cancelled up to $1.9 billion in grants, around 26% of the SAMHSA budget, hitting as many as 2,800 front-line mental health and recovery providers, exactly the professionals Psychwire trains. Add English-only creative, no local entity in any new market, and a long, high-consideration purchase, and international expansion looked like the wrong bet at the wrong time.

Objective: Prove that a small, disciplined Google AI foundation could open the world profitably, without discounting the brand, without local teams, and inside a modest budget. Turn a single-market business into a genuinely global one while protecting premium positioning and blended efficiency.

Google Ads is the engine of the business. In the first half of 2026 it generated 63% of Psychwire’s total revenue across all channels. Targets were set conservatively against the Performance Planner and internal forecasts, precisely because the plan asked the account to do something it had never done: sell into markets no one could pre-qualify.

Strategy & Execution

1.  Reverse targeting: let the world raise its hand.

I drove account health, tracking, and adoption to a level that let Google’s AI make trustworthy decisions at global scale, including organisation-level Customer Match, which is brutally hard here because buyers purchase as clinics and institutions, not as individuals with personal emails and phone numbers.

→  99% account optimisation score, 100% AI Max adoption across every Search campaign, and a 90%+ Customer Match rate against the odds.

2.  Reverse targeting: let the world raise its hand.

Instead of hand-picking countries we could not verify, I flipped the playbook. Once the signals were clean, worldwide campaigns targeted the entire globe minus a short exclusion list, and let Google’s AI and live conversion data reveal where demand actually lived.

→  Demand surfaced in markets we could never have justified manually, turning an unanswerable question, where should we expand, into a measured answer.

3.  Let AI localise the creative.

With asset optimisation enabled, ads served automatically in multiple languages, so English-only origins stopped being a barrier to non-English markets.

→  Native-language delivery across dozens of countries with zero added production.

4.  Re-architect the account from Search to PMax and Demand Gen.

I rebuilt from 10 campaigns to 42, directing all incremental budget into Performance Max and Demand Gen while making Search leaner and sharper.

→  100% Excellent asset group strength in PMax, a rating that is exceptional and rarely achieved, and a structure built to scale.

5.  Build a free-content demand engine, not a testimonial reel.

Demand Gen paired very long form (over 2 minutes) and very short form (under 15 seconds) creative, native to YouTube, giving prospects a genuine taste of the training that competitors charge for. It captured ebook downloads, email subscribers, and free-course starts, every one of them a retargetable, warm signal.

→  100% Excellent ad strength across Demand Gen and a top-of-funnel pipeline feeding the entire system.

6.  Create demand, then charge for it.

Rather than discounting to enter new markets, I used ad customisers to run a dynamic pricing ladder, Very Early Bird to Early Bird to full price, with live countdown timers driving urgency at every step.

→  Premium positioning protected and margin expanded while volume scaled, the opposite of a discount-led land grab.

Key Results

THE WHOLE BUSINESS GREW, AND GOOGLE ADS DROVE THE MAJORITY OF THAT GROWTH

• Total business revenue across all channels rose +39.66%
• Google Ads produced about 61% of total business growth, while simultaneously opening 60 new countries.

A SINGLE-MARKET BUSINESS BECAME A GLOBAL ONE

• Countries with tracked sales grew from 18 to 78, including 60 brand new markets entered this period.
• International conversion value rose +45%, now 74% of the business, up from 71%.
• The United States is now the number one market at (+26%), overtaking home-market Australia at (+23%).
• North America reached 58% of all value, at +23% year on year.

SCALED HARD AND STAYED EFFICIENT

• Total conversion value +38%, on spend of (+38%), holding blended ROAS flat at 8.73x.
• Search did more with less: spend down 15%, ROAS up +23% to 11.03x.
• Performance Max scaled volume +168%, absorbing the growth budget.
• Demand Gen launched from zero as the new top-of-funnel supply line.

The engine is a system, not a campaign: perfect the AI signals, open targeting to the world, let live data pick the markets, localise with AI, and monetise with dynamic pricing. It can be pointed at any new region tomorrow with the same framework.