How a PPC Agency Consultant Got Ryftpay's Google Ads Performing Again

The Client

Ryftpay is a London-based fintech startup building embedded payment infrastructure for digital marketplaces and multi-vendor platforms. Founded by Sadra Hosseini (CEO) and Alex Mackenzie (Managing Director) — the team behind restaurant marketplace app Butlr — Ryftpay emerged from a firsthand frustration: existing payment processors were too expensive, too slow, and too rigid for marketplace businesses trying to scale. Ryftpay was the solution they wished they had had.

Ryftpay’s platform automates split payments, customises commission rates, manages escrow, and delivers next-day payouts for marketplace merchants — all at a flat fee per transaction, and in full compliance with FCA, PSD2, and PCI DSS Level 1 standards. It serves over 1,500 merchants across hospitality, retail, ticketing, and services — and has been named a finalist for Fintech of the Year at the UK FinTech Awards 2026.

The company has raised £7.4M in total funding — including a £5.7M Series A led by EdenBase, with backing from the British Business Bank, Pembroke VCT, Ingenii VC, and angel investors from PayPal. Ryftpay competes directly with Stripe Connect and Adyen, offering marketplace businesses greater flexibility, lower fees, and faster payouts.

The Challenge

When GrowthSpin began working with Ryftpay, the company’s Google Ads campaigns had hit a rough patch — spend was flowing but performance had deteriorated, and the paid search channel was no longer delivering the pipeline results the team needed. For a fast-growing B2B fintech trying to win enterprise marketplace clients away from established incumbents like Stripe and Adyen, a broken paid search engine was a critical growth blocker.

Three specific problems needed addressing:

• Underperforming PPC campaigns. Google Ads campaigns had lost effectiveness and were no longer generating the volume or quality of leads required to support Ryftpay’s sales pipeline. Performance had declined and internal efforts to course-correct had not resolved the underlying issues.

• B2B audience targeting complexity. Reaching the right decision-makers — platform founders, CTOs, and marketplace operators — via paid search requires precise keyword strategy and intent mapping. Broad or misdirected targeting was generating clicks without qualified pipeline.

• Paid search as a GTM dependency. For Ryftpay’s go-to-market strategy, paid search was a primary inbound channel — making its underperformance a significant commercial risk. Restoring the channel’s effectiveness was a business-critical priority, not just a marketing optimisation task.

Our Approach

GrowthSpin was brought in as a paid search consultant to diagnose and rebuild Ryftpay’s Google Ads operation, working directly with the demand generation team to restore campaign performance and rebuild the channel as a reliable source of qualified pipeline.

Phase 1: Campaign Audit and Diagnosis

We began with a comprehensive audit of Ryftpay’s existing Google Ads account structure — reviewing campaign architecture, keyword strategy, match types, bidding strategies, quality scores, and conversion tracking. The audit surfaced the specific structural and strategic issues driving the performance decline. Budget was being consumed by poorly matched queries, bidding strategies were misaligned with the B2B conversion cycle, and the account structure was not set up to capture high-intent marketplace payment searches effectively. A prioritised remediation plan was developed to address the most impactful issues first.

Phase 2: Keyword Strategy and Campaign Restructure

With the diagnosis complete, we rebuilt Ryftpay’s keyword strategy from the ground up. High-intent commercial terms targeting marketplace operators and platform founders — searches around split payments, marketplace payment solutions, and Stripe Connect alternatives — were brought to the fore. Negative keyword lists were expanded to filter irrelevant consumer payment traffic, and match types were tightened to protect budget. Campaign structure was reorganised by intent stage and product use case, ensuring that each campaign was serving its designed purpose in the funnel. Ad copy was refreshed to speak directly to Ryftpay’s core value proposition: lower fees, next-day payouts, and full regulatory compliance.

Phase 3: Bidding Optimisation and Performance Recovery

The final phase focused on bidding strategy and ongoing optimisation. Automated bidding strategies were recalibrated to align with Ryftpay’s longer B2B sales cycle and the conversion actions that mattered most — demo requests and direct contact form submissions. Conversion tracking was reviewed to ensure the data feeding into Smart Bidding algorithms was accurate and representative. With the structural and strategic foundations rebuilt, campaigns were monitored closely and optimised iteratively — progressively restoring performance and returning paid search to a functioning acquisition channel for the Ryftpay team.

The Results

By combining a rigorous diagnostic audit with a full campaign restructure and bidding optimisation, GrowthSpin restored Ryftpay’s paid search channel to performance.

• PPC campaigns fully restored to performance — Google Ads moved from a rough patch back to a reliable inbound acquisition channel for the demand generation team.

• Rebuilt keyword strategy targeting high-intent marketplace payment and Stripe Connect alternative searches, with expanded negative keyword lists to eliminate wasted spend on irrelevant consumer queries.

• Restructured campaign architecture organised by intent stage and product use case, giving the team clear visibility into where budget was working and where it wasn’t.

• Recalibrated bidding strategies aligned to Ryftpay’s B2B conversion cycle and demo-request objectives, ensuring Smart Bidding algorithms were optimising toward the right outcomes.

Key Takeaways

1. B2B PPC requires a specialist approach. Paid search for a B2B fintech selling to marketplace operators is fundamentally different from consumer PPC. Intent signals, keyword strategy, bidding logic, and conversion tracking all need to be configured around a longer, higher-value sales cycle. Generic campaign management approaches will consistently underdeliver.

2. Diagnosis before intervention. When PPC campaigns are underperforming, the instinct is often to adjust bids or swap creative. But without a rigorous structural audit, the underlying causes remain unaddressed. The right starting point is always a systematic diagnosis — identifying exactly what is broken before changing anything.

3. Paid search is infrastructure, not an optional channel. For a growth-stage fintech challenging established players, paid search captures the demand that your brand reputation and content marketing has generated. When PPC stops working, it doesn’t just affect the marketing dashboard — it creates a hole in the commercial pipeline. Maintaining a healthy, well-structured paid search channel is a business imperative.

About GrowthSpin

GrowthSpin is a London-based growth marketing studio led by Neha Divanji. We work as outsourced in-house growth marketers for funded startups and scale-ups, offering fractional growth leadership, performance marketing (Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok), and product strategy with UI/UX design.

Looking for a paid search consultant to fix and scale your B2B PPC campaigns? Book a call at growthspin.co.uk/calendar