Eye of the Tiger Tattoo

Eye of the Tiger Tattoo is a small three-artist studio in San Francisco’s Sunset District, open since 2013. Tattoo is a considered purchase: a meaningful piece is something people sit with for weeks or months, and the price makes them deliberate, so the payoff from marketing shows up on a long delay rather than the next day. The studio had tried Yelp advertising, then Facebook and Instagram ads. Neither had moved the needle.

We rebuilt the site and took over SEO to lift Eye of the Tiger’s visibility in Google Search, then ran Google Ads on top. Judging those ads by Google’s default column understates them: it dates every conversion back to the ad click, on a 90-day window, so a considered purchase like a tattoo can look like zero conversions when in fact bookings are coming in on a steady drip. Once we pulled the report by conversion date instead, the campaign was converting all along, roughly one booking every ten days. We rebuilt attribution from there, watching Vagaro for the actual client and appointment counts alongside Google’s data, and running a quiet pause-test every so often to see what the ads are really doing.

Eye of the Tiger Tattoo reports revenue up 30% since we started. The rebuilt site and SEO are doing the heavy lifting: in a recent two-month window, organic search delivered 23 booking-form confirmations, direct traffic 11, and paid search 3. That correctly sizes Google Ads as a smaller but measurable channel, a steady nine bookings in 90 days, roughly one every ten days. Over half the ad spend was going to keywords that never converted, so we stripped the account to four proven terms and pulled broad match, which was dead weight against a considered purchase like this. Between March 28 and June 24, Vagaro shows 67 new clients on top of the regulars, 198 kept appointments, and a 97% show rate; of the 55 form fills from the site in that window, 22 became new clients and 18 kept their appointments. Since the cleanup, the booking engine is steady at about 21 new clients a month with a 98% show rate. When we paused the ads for an experiment Eye of the Tiger Tattoo saw the shop go quiet and asked to turn them back on.