The starting point

Snopro is a ski-rental delivery business that had been growing steadily in New Zealand. For the 2025–26 northern season, they decided to launch into Japan: a market with no existing brand recognition, no campaign history, and a booking funnel that had never been tested outside a domestic context. The question wasn't whether Google Ads could work there. It was whether you could build a funnel cold, in a new market, and have it profitable from the opening weeks.

What we did

We started with tracking, before a single yen of spend. Conversion goals were wired to the booking funnel and verified against actual completions, so the data coming back would be trustworthy from day one. Campaigns were built from scratch: search and Shopping structured around the way Japanese skiers actually search, not a copy-paste of the NZ account. The landing and booking funnel went through several rounds of iteration as early data came in, tightening the path between click and confirmed booking.

On the New Zealand side, the same tracking-first approach applied to a more mature account. Sessions grew 85% from 2023 to 2024, and bookings followed with a 21% lift over the same period.

Results

The Japan launch returned ¥7.99m in revenue across 132 bookings in its first season, October to December 2025. Google Ads returned 33x on roughly NZD 8.4k of spend. For a market entry with no prior history, that is the kind of first season that makes a second season easy to justify.

What made it work

Launching in a new market is a tracking problem before it is a budget problem. The instinct is to spend and see. The better move is to wire the measurement correctly, then spend carefully, because every dollar in those early weeks is teaching the account something. Get the data right first and the optimisation follows. Get it wrong and you spend the whole season guessing.