If you've been running Google Ads for your ecommerce store for a while but feel like you've hit a plateau, then this one's for you.
I recently experimented with three Google Ads strategies that boosted ecommerce revenue by 60-100% within 30 days—and I'm about to show you exactly how to do them yourself.
1. Performance Max & Shopping Ads: Finding Your ROAS Sweet Spot
The first strategy involves optimising your existing Performance Max or Shopping Ads campaigns to generate more actual profit.
Many ecommerce businesses make the mistake of focusing on their return on ad spend (ROAS) alone, without considering how it impacts overall profit.
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Add a Profit Column to Google Ads.
To truly optimise for profit, it’s crucial that you can actually see your gross profit after ad spend directly in Google Ads. Add a custom column in Google Ads for gross profit after ad spend by using a formula like this:
Conversion value x Gross Profit Margin - Cost
This allows you to see your actual profit alongside other metrics. Knowing your gross profit helps you make informed decisions.
2. The Profit Curve & ROAS Sweet Spot.
To get more profit from your Performance Max or Shopping campaigns, you need to understand two concepts: the Profit Curve and the ROAS Sweet Spot. As you increase your ROAS target, profit will rise—but only up to a certain point. Beyond this point, further increases in ROAS lead to diminishing profits.
To find this sweet spot, start by slightly raising or lowering your ROAS target. The sweet spot will vary for every business, but testing and analysing your revenue, costs, and profit can help pinpoint where this balance lies. In practice, this means adjusting your ROAS target every few weeks, monitoring how gross profit and revenue respond, and making adjustments until you find that optimal balance.
In a recent client example, we moved the ROAS target from 5.5x to 4.7x. This resulted in a 92% increase in profit and a 129% increase in revenue. They were initially at what I like to call the “Red Point B”—a ROAS level that looked great on paper but wasn’t maximising profitability.
This ROAS sweet spot varies by business. For example, in competitive markets where gross profit margins average around 50%, the sweet spot tends to lie between 300% to 400% ROAS. If your profit margins are lower, expect the sweet spot to be lower as well. Keep testing until you see a pattern in your results.
2. Top Seller Product Feed Optimisation: The 80/20 Rule
The second strategy is all about optimising the most important parts of your product feed. Your Google Ads campaign, particularly Shopping Ads, is likely driving a majority of its revenue from a handful of top-selling products. It’s time to focus on those.
Rather than tackling your entire feed, which could take months, take an 80/20 approach and optimise the two most impactful fields for just your best sellers: the Product Title and the Product Type.
These fields have a significant influence on how Google ranks your products in search results. I’ve seen huge gains by optimising product titles to include more relevant, high-volume keywords. And the good news? You don’t need an expensive product feed tool to make these changes. Google Merchant Center now allows you to directly edit these fields.
When optimising your product titles, make sure they are over 100 characters long, ideally around 130-150 characters. Use descriptive keywords, like "Men's Leather RFID Blocking Wallet", instead of generic names. Add your brand at the end, and use separators like pipes (|) or dashes (-) to create a structured, keyword-rich title.
For Product Types, aim for four levels deep, from broad to specific, including keywords at each level. For instance: Men's Apparel > Men's Accessories > RFID Blocking Wallets > Leather Wallets.
By optimising these two fields for your top-selling products, you’re effectively communicating with Google in a language it understands, helping your products appear in more searches and improving both clicks and conversions.
3. Pivoting Shopping Data into Search Campaigns
The third and final strategy is to expand your reach by turning your Shopping Ads data into new Search campaigns. Once you've optimised your Shopping or Performance Max campaigns to generate more profit, you can reinvest some of that profit into launching new Search campaigns.
1. Use Search Terms Insights from PMax
Performance Max campaigns accumulate a wealth of data, including search terms that are already driving conversions. Here’s how to use them:
Download the Search Terms Insights Report from Google Ads and extract the high-converting terms.
Prioritise those search terms and group them into logical ad groups.
Launch a new Search campaign using both phrase and exact match for these terms.
2. Setting Up a Profitable Search Campaign
When launching your Search campaign, set your daily budget quite low initially. Choose "Maximise Conversions" or "Maximise Conversion Value" as your bid strategy but avoid setting a target ROAS or CPA at the start. Give Google time to gather data, and only start adding targets after achieving 30-50 conversions.
In this way, you’re leveraging the tested keywords from Shopping campaigns to create targeted Search campaigns, with the goal of generating even more profitable revenue streams over time.
And there you have it:
Three proven strategies to boost your ecommerce Google Ads revenue by 60-100% within 30 days.
If you haven't yet explored optimising your ROAS sweet spot, fine-tuning product titles and types, or expanding your Shopping Ads into the Search network, now is the time. Give these strategies a shot and see how much more profit you can generate.
Conclusion
To summarise, the three strategies covered in this newsletter are:
Performance Max/Shopping Ads Profit Optimisation: Add a custom profit column to monitor gross profit after ad spend and adjust your ROAS target to find the sweet spot.
Top Seller Product Feed Optimisation: Focus on optimising product titles and product types for your top-selling products, using descriptive, keyword-rich language.
Pivot Shopping Data into Search Expansion: Use Performance Max campaign data to create a new Search campaign, leveraging high-converting search terms to generate additional profitable revenue.