How Bounce Audio turned online rentals into a new-customer engine

Bounce Audio started as a record shop and grew into one of Melbourne's most trusted hire businesses, supplying speaker and DJ equipment to everything from house parties to festivals. In 2025, they got caught in a vicious cycle. Google Ads had stopped delivering, the website kept crashing, and the market had slowed, all at once. In Symphony rebuilt the foundation from the brand up. Over the six months that followed, a new website automated 31% of their hire bookings and saved countless hours of back and forth. A refreshed Google Ads and SEO strategy found new customers who drove 51% of hire revenue.

The problem: three things went wrong at once

Bounce Audio was spending around $2,000 a month on Google Ads set to autopilot. Then three things hit together. The market quietened, the ads stopped delivering, and the website started crashing intermittently, with each problem making the others worse. The ads had only ever tracked form submissions, never actual bookings, so they were driving traffic to a site that couldn't take a booking online. When that traffic dried up, there was nothing underneath to hold it together.

What we found: the system was flying blind

We tried to fix the ad campaigns but couldn't get them to work. The ads measured form fills, not real bookings, so nobody could see what was actually working. The website had taken multiple band-aid fixes over time and was crashing constantly as a result, and it didn't reflect the brand properly, so even traffic that landed didn't meet a site that built trust. The foundation was the problem, not the campaigns. Fixing it meant getting the brand and positioning right first, then rebuilding the site to track and convert.

The plan

Get the positioning right, then build the site around it, then rebuild the marketing on top. Run a branding workshop first. Design and build a new website with online bookings, ready for summer. Then relaunch Google Ads and SEO against real customer data, and set up email for retention.

What we did

We ran a branding workshop that positioned Bounce Audio as the friendly alternative to your usual tech bro AV hire, run by DJs who actually help. Book it yourself, pick it up, plug it in. Then we carefully designed the website around two different checkout flows, a shop flow and a hire flow, with navigation that always made it clear which one you were in. It was a delicate build to get right.

Because the new store was built fresh in Shopify with Booqable running the hire side, we also handled a full migration off their old WordPress and WooCommerce site. Hundreds of pages moved across, with new URLs, new breadcrumbs and the whole site re-indexed. It is an intricate job you only get one shot at, and rankings held and grew through it rather than dropping.

We built in online bookings, put heatmap tracking on from launch, and six months in we analysed the data, simplified navigation and lifted the conversion rate. We also prepared the site for AI search from the ground up, with structured data and FAQ schema throughout, so tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI can find, understand and cite Bounce. Then we rebuilt Google Ads and SEO on top and set up their Klaviyo email programme with properly structured customer data.

The result: new customers driving half the revenue

Across the six months to March 2026, new customers we helped Bounce Audio find drove 51% of hire revenue. Our detailed reporting broke down exactly how many customers were new versus returning each month, so the team could see the acquisition working and keep going after it. Around 31% of bookings now happen automatically online, which the submit form never allowed and which saved the team significant time. With conversion tracking finally in place, the Google Ads had real signals to work with and returned a new customer MER of 7x, meaning every dollar of marketing brought back seven dollars of revenue from brand new customers.

The search results ran counter to the whole market. Across 2025 and 2026, most ecommerce sites lost organic clicks to Google's AI Overviews. Bounce Audio grew instead. Keywords ranking in Google's top three went from 33 to 133 after the new website launched, a 4x jump, and non-branded search lifted 46% as new customers who had never heard of Bounce started finding them. Homepage traffic is up 276% on last year. And because we prepared the site for AI search, Bounce now draws visibility inside Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT as well, not just the classic results page.

In summary, over the six months to March 2026:

• New customer MER of 7x, and 51% of hire revenue from brand new customers

• Top three Google rankings up from 33 to 133, with a 46% lift in non-branded search

• Homepage traffic up 276%, plus growing visibility in ChatGPT and AI search

Why it worked: the foundation became an engine

Get the brand and positioning right first. Build the website on top of that. Then let the messaging, Google Ads and SEO all flow from the same foundation. When those pieces line up, they stop working in isolation and start compounding, every channel playing the same tune instead of solo. Consistent positioning made the ads land, the ads and SEO fed the site, and the site converted, an engine that kept finding new customers instead of just reprinting receipts for old ones.

The takeaway

If your marketing has stalled, the fix might not be your ads. Ads are part of a chain: ad, landing page, website, offer. Every link has to line up, and the same goes for SEO. At In Symphony, we look at the foundations first, get the brand and positioning right, then build everything on top. The rest compounds Want us to look at yours? Book a free audit.