HeadshotPro efficiency after the AI headshot boom ended

How HeadshotPro improved Google Ads efficiency

after the AI headshot boom ended

The AI headshot market peaked in 2023. By 2024, competitors had multiplied, CPCs were rising and the easy growth phase of the category had ended.

HeadshotPro had built its business early in that cycle. But the conditions that made early entry efficient had changed, and the Google Ads account needed a structure that could still generate return in a more contested market.

HeadshotPro is an AI headshot service founded by Danny Postma that generates professional portrait photos from a set of uploaded selfies, removing the need for a professional photographer. The product is available as a one-time purchase for individuals and also offers team packages for organisations.

The situation

Before working with Adverge, Danny ran HeadshotPro’s Google Ads himself alongside running the business. The campaigns were live, but profitability was below where it needed to be. Advertising costs were weighing on the business without a clear path to improving return within the existing account structure.

Two things were working against the account:

1. Refunded orders were being counted as conversions.
   HeadshotPro offers refunds to reduce purchase friction, which makes sense for a product where customers upload photos before they can judge the final result. But it also meant Google’s bidding algorithm was learning from cancelled purchases and optimising toward audiences that were not actually contributing to the business.
2. Second, the account was not yet structured for international expansion.
   HeadshotPro had global demand, but there was no clear analytical foundation for deciding which markets were worth scaling into and which should be avoided.

What we did

Adverge’s starting point was to establish the economics before expanding reach.

1. Break-even CPA

Adverge worked with Danny to map product margins, refund rates and the CPA the account had to operate at to be viable.

This changed the way decisions were made. Optimisation was no longer based on a directional goal like “improve ROAS.” Every campaign decision now had a clear economic reference point: could this market, campaign or segment generate customers at or below break-even?

2. Refund exclusion

Refunded orders were removed from the conversion signal using Google’s conversion adjustments.

In the short term, this made the account look worse before it looked better. Reported conversion volume fell because refunded orders were no longer counted as successful outcomes.

That was the correct trade-off. The algorithm was now optimising toward purchases that contributed to the business, not cancelled orders that inflated performance data.

3. Country expansion by conversion rate

Once the conversion signal and break-even targets were in place, the account was expanded to roughly 60 countries.

The expansion was structured around conversion quality by market rather than broad geographic coverage. English-speaking markets stood out as the strongest performers, with higher conversion rates and stronger ROAS than the account average.

Markets with high bot traffic rates were excluded. Instead of expanding uniformly, the structure reflected where the account could generate return at or above break-even.

The results

The improvement was not created by counting more conversions. It happened after refunded orders were removed from the conversion signal, which made the account harder to optimise on paper but healthier in reality.

ROAS	Increased by 20% over the engagement period
Market coverage	Expanded to roughly 60 countries, with English-speaking markets as core focus
Founder involvement	Danny freed from day-to-day campaign management

During the same period, the AI headshot category became more competitive and conversion volume declined as the post-hype market normalised. Against that backdrop, ROAS increased by 20%.

That made the improvement more meaningful than a simple efficiency lift. The account became more profitable while the market became less forgiving.

For Danny personally, the shift in time overhead was the result he noticed first. Managing campaigns himself had been a continuous demand alongside running the business. With Adverge running the account, that was no longer the case.

The cleaner account structure also gave HeadshotPro a stronger foundation for serving both individual buyers and organisations using its team packages.