Introduction:

This silicone rings brand hired us for Google Ads and joined our “SEM domination program” as they wanted to grow in their target markets through Google Ads.

The brand decided to branch one of its non performing product categories out into its own brand, and let me run it up with Google Ads

The main brand has existed for 6 years and tried multiple full-service agencies but has not been able to grow its sales in a very long time.

This changed after the owners approached me.

Challenges Faced:

The challenges faced were:

1. Not knowing which overall strategy to follow
2. Not knowing which metrics to follow
3. Not knowing how to grow further
4. Not knowing how to communicate their wants and needs to former marketing providers

and most of everything - a super un-optimized Google Ads account, where managers have been reacting and making decisions on wrong data

Strategy & Approach:

As a counterweight to the challenges faced, we quickly began to draft a strategy on which markets to focus on, to begin with, and which campaign formats to focus on (where we would get the biggest “back for the buck”

When i began working with the brand search ads were the only thing running with some success, so search was the first area to optimize. I quickly dug into past data and picked 1-2 main markets and segmented those into their own search campaigns which enabled me to A) set specific budgets for each market and B) set specific ROAS targets for each market

To begin with the conversion tracking was a bit of a mess, and dynamic remarketing wasn’t setup, so we quickly implemented a server-side tracking solution for conversion tracking and made the right dynamic remarketing setup. Scaling ecommerce Google Ads with flawed conversion tracking/tracking in general is a huge risk, and you could end up pouring way to much money into a broken machine.

Next up it was time to crack on which the shopping/product listing ads for the brand. Shopping was tried before, but with very little success, so i began to build and optimize our shopping feed BEFORE wasting any more ad spend on shopping campaigns that might or might not fail to bring the return that we wanted.

After the new product feed was built and optimized with all relevant attributes, we set the first test in the form of a Std. Shopping campaign for our main market. Results were acceptable from the first 3-4 weeks of testing (much better than previous attempts 👀) so I decided to let it ride for a while and performance kept improving.

Results from Performance Max is now solid and consistent, and we are slowly but surely scaling our shopping/PLA ads through this campaign alone.

Our next step is to invest in better assets for our Performance Max campaigns and run search ads to custom landing pages while continuing to improve customer experience on site (CRO) and we are quite confident that we could continue to scale with these things alone.

If everything goes as planned, we could begin to unlock more markets in Q3.

Enough talk! Let’s see some numbers!

Took the brand from £0 → £57.000/mo (and still scaling) with Google Ads only

Took their Google Ads from £60/day → ~£200/day

The majority of these are new customers

Takeaways?

So what could be the learning from this case study?

If you are an ecommerce owner, brand operator, CMO, or marketing professional reading this, the main learning from this is to make sure to do the fundamentals right, to begin with. If you try to run before you can walk you end up wasting a lot of hard-earned money on something that will never generate an acceptable return

What we did well was owning the fundamental aspects of Google Ads, and making sure to do the boring work before we could move on to the more sexy work while being confident enough to trust our gut feeling when it came to keyword targeting and RSA tests.

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