Revenue up 129% year over year for an independent windsurfing retailer

The challenge

North Beach Windsurfing sells windsurfing and paddleboarding gear from a shop on St. Pete Beach, with lessons and rentals on the water out back. Windsurfing is a niche sport with hard seasonal swings, and the shop competes for customers nationally against larger online retailers. The paid budget is small, so there is no room for spend that reaches people without converting them.

Demand also moves in ways a set-and-forget campaign can't follow. Summer brings lesson bookings and beginner gear sales, winter brings off-season contraction and rising cost per click. North Beach needed a partner that could manage content and SEO alongside paid media and adjust both as the season turned.

The approach

Big Sea and Cordelia Labs work as one integrated team, and North Beach has been on the roster since 2017. The early years of the partnership rebuilt the site's search foundation and its first Shopping campaigns, work that reached a 46x return on ad spend by 2018 and became Big Sea's AMA Tampa Bay Marketer of the Year submission that year.

The current program runs a deliberate mix on a small budget. Google Shopping carries the volume, delivering thousands of product clicks a month at a cost per click as low as $0.18. High-intent search campaigns for windsurfing products and lessons run alongside it and reach click-through rates as high as 14 percent.

A niche campaign covers wing foiling terms as that sport grows, and a Meta Dynamic Shopping campaign retargets shoppers for around $600 a month. The team reviews geography, device, and campaign performance monthly, shifts budget toward the strongest markets, and added a Performance Max campaign in June 2026 that brought in 2,037 incremental clicks in its first month.

The results

March 2026 told the year-over-year story. Tracked revenue across the program rose 129.1 percent from March 2025, and has continued to grow. Clicks grew 54.5 percent while cost per click fell 24 percent, and conversions rose 54.9 percent. Paid Shopping revenue grew 162.7 percent year over year, and the $600-a-month Meta program grew its revenue contribution 725 percent.

Efficiency kept improving into the spring. April delivered 894 conversions at a blended cost per conversion of $3.00, down 19.9 percent in a month, and top products included beginner lesson packages with revenue up 120 percent. By June the account's average cost per click had dropped to $0.23.

For an independent beach shop spending comparatively so little, the program produces national reach and revenue that used to require a much bigger budget.