For those of you that prefer to read…
Hey everyone,
In today’s blog post, I’m excited to show you how we took a sports brand from generating close to nothing on Google Ads... all the way up to $2.8M in revenue — producing a whooping ROAS of 6x on Google Ads!
This will be relevant to anyone who’s looking to grow revenue and profit for their Ecommerce store.
If you are already doing Google Ads, I promise you that there will be plenty of tips and tricks in this post that will help you do it even better.
And if you aren’t already doing Google Ads, well then make sure you have a pen and notepad handy because you’ll be in for a wild ride today!
As always, I promise to answer all of your questions about the tips in this blog post if you pop them in the comments below. So go ahead and reach out to me if you need clarification on any of the ideas I’m about to share.
The Challenge
The brand we worked with specialised in making really high quality paddle boards that they sold directly to consumers on their website.
When they reached out to me, they were basically at ground zero with Google Ads. They’d set up a few low-spend Shopping campaigns and had a few conversions, but the opportunity was ripe for the taking. After looking at their ad account, I knew we had to get in there and set everything up from the ground up.
So part of the challenge was starting from scratch with Google Ads. That’s always the most challenging time for any account.
To make it even more daunting, we were advertising an outdoor sports product right when there was a global pandemic starting — OUCH! Would people even be searching for paddle boards anymore? That was a huge question looming in all our minds.
Another challenge is that we were working with a seasonal business with a high season around the summer months, when we were expecting demand to surge. However, in the low season, we knew that one of the trials we might face would be to get enough sales... despite lower search volume.
Worse still, we had to consider the challenge of supply chain management!
Exacerbated by the global pandemic, getting new stock in quickly enough to keep up with the demand we could generate might be tricky.
And so, our Google Ads campaign would have to be carefully-paced, to make sure that we didn’t sell too much and end up with unhappy customers having to wait a long time for stock to come in.
How We Did It
When starting from scratch on Google Ads, you need to identify first the highest leverage, 80/20 areas of the account. This means to find the 20% of things that are going to generate 80% of the results, AND aggressively doing those things first before anything else.
For a fresh Ecommerce Google Ads account, the 80/20 is usually Shopping Ads, and then Search Ads.
Of course there are other fun campaign types in Google Ads, such as Display Network or Youtube Ads. However, if you want to start with the campaigns with the highest chance of quickly generating profit, then you normally should start with those two — and probably in that order too!
Getting SMART About Shopping Ads
For the Shopping Ads campaign, we went with Smart Shopping Ads. If you’d like to see a breakdown of the pros and cons of Smart Shopping, check out my video on that.
In this case we did a test of Standard vs. Smart Shopping. From that, we concluded that we were getting enough extra volume from Smart Shopping to just stick with it alone, and suffer the tradeoff of having no search terms data.
To get the new Shopping campaigns really pumped up, we created a brand-new product feed. Then, we completely rewrote the Product Titles. Product Titles are the most important item in your feed — they determine which keywords Google decides to show your Shopping Ads for. So we knew that the 80/20 of the Shopping feed was right there: the Product Titles themselves.
Since launching the new and improved shopping feed and campaigns, here’s a look at what happened to weekly revenue from Shopping Ads.
As you can see, it’s been a wild ride, with a current performance at around $70K USD revenue PER WEEK.
Searching For Something Special
Over on the Search side of things, we researched keywords, wrote awesome ad copy, and created a bunch of new campaigns including:
Product Keywords Campaign.
Generic Keywords Campaign.
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA).
RLSA Head Terms.
Competitors.
The Product Keywords Campaign was targeted at anyone searching for non-brand keywords and had shown the highest level of intent and relevance.
In the case of this client, we realised this was for longer-tail keywords; anyone searching for “paddle board” or “SUP” in combination with other words that showed they were really specific. For example “inflatable stand up paddle board” or “multi person SUP” or “dog stand up paddle board” are some examples.
As a side note, yes, doing stand-up paddle boarding with your dog is an actual thing — and it looks frickin’ awesome!!
The Generic keywords campaign is used for shorter-tailed keywords. The people we target here are still definitely looking for a paddle board, but they are using shorter keywords that indicate a lower relevance and intent level. Keyword examples here are simply “paddle board” or “sup”.
When you want to run high-performing search campaigns, it’s super important to segment your campaigns according to intent level, exactly like this. How you segment is really up to you, just make sure you choose a system that works and is easy to understand.
To quickly cover the other campaign types:
DSA is an auto generated campaign we used on a low budget in order to discover new keyword ideas for us.
RLSA Head Terms is a campaign where we added retargeting audiences in “Targeting” mode to narrow our audience down to people who are searching for our keywords, and have definitely been to our site recently. In this campaign, we target much broader keywords than we would normally, such as “water sports” or “board”.
If you are wondering what kind of performance we got after all this work, check this out:
Much like with our Shopping campaigns, we’re currently sitting at around $70K in revenue PER WEEK.
And this brings me to an important point: oftentimes in Ecommerce, the revenue split between Search and Shopping is around the 50/50 mark.
I often see Ecom people who are only doing Shopping, thinking that this is all they need to do. But… you can potentially be making double the revenue out of Google Ads if you go ahead and set up search as well!
When you advertise on search as well as shopping, you get more total sales — sales that you don’t get access to when you only do shopping!
One last thing we did was to experiment with ROAS Targets in the account...
ROAS Targets Experiments
As I mentioned earlier, we knew that due to the length of time it takes for the client to replenish stock, there would be times when we needed to throttle the campaign to account for lower stock levels.
The way we did this was to increase the ROAS targets in our Target ROAS bid strategies whenever the client would let us know that there was the possibility of upcoming stock shortages.
When we increase ROAS targets, what happens is The Machine will respond by decreasing the Cost-Per-Click bids. When you decrease CPCs, you get a lower impression share, which reduces your overall sales volume.
What also happens is that because your costs are lower, you get a much better margin on each sale, so your profitability per sale goes way up.
Just like this we were able to influence the sales volume of the campaign based on what we knew about the client’s business.
During low season, for example, we’d decrease ROAS targets to help us pump up the sales volume. And in high season, when search volume was high and it was time to make hay while the proverbial sun was shining, we’d increase ROAS targets to make better margins and control the level at which we were selling stock.
Another important aspect of ROAS targets is to find the ROAS sweet spot. What I’ve just described is the relationship between ROAS target, profit per sale, and total sales volume.
When you increase ROAS, profit per sale goes up but total sales volume goes down. And when you decrease ROAS, profit per sale goes down and sales volume goes up.
The ROAS sweet spot is basically the ideal ROAS that balances those two things and achieves the greatest overall total gross profit.
A big part of what we did for this client was to do month-over-month testing to figure out where that sweet spot lies for their business.
In Summary
Before you can create any success with Google Ads, you first need to have an awesome business with a solid product that people actually want.
You can’t strap a pair of wings to a brick and expect it to fly. And you can’t do Google Ads for a sub-par product and expect it to succeed.
When this brand came to us, I knew they already had something that was primed to succeed on Google. And then we came in and focused on what we do best: the 80/20 of Google Ads, maximising the revenue potential of Search and Shopping Ads.
And if you’d like to find out more about my agency, Big Flare, or to have a chat with me about potentially working together, head on over here to schedule a call.