GoPro is in the “go big” business, building its brand on the backs and boards of extreme sports athletes like surfers, snowboarders and BASE jumpers.

And for the release of its latest camera, the GoPro Hero3, the brand went really big, plotting an online ad strategy that stretched its fourth-quarter ad budget eight times beyond what it spent during the same period last year.

GoPro’s promotional pillars are ongoing event sponsorships like the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, which keep the brand in front of its core audience. But this year’s ad strategy “really was an attempt to break GoPro out of our niche core awareness circles,” said Lee Topar, GoPro’s director of online marketing.

GoPro started planning for the October release of the GoPro Hero3 six months ago. The brand hired Carat as its lead media agency and began to scale up its work with Google’s ad tech products and Google Analytics consultant Analytics Pros, Topar said.

During the fourth quarter, GoPro rang up 450 million impressions across online properties including ESPN, Fox Sports and more than 70 new sites or ad networks the brand hadn’t advertised on before. The brand also hit 2.5 billion search impressions. “Facebook and Twitter played a solid role, too,” Topar said. “Sixty percent of those impressions were on video networks, and 90 percent were on social platforms [including YouTube].”

Nonetheless, he described the effort as GoPro’s “most successful product launch ever,” having already notched a top 10 YouTube video ad and nearly selling out the product.

(INSERT A “HELL YES!” AFTER THIS….BAM!)