Overview

Over at Yoru Marketing, we believe that personal investment is the best time of investment to make to improve overall marketing skills. As the founder of one of the fastest growing Google Ads agencies, Shri Kanase took it in his own hands to gain knowledge with Google Ads.

And what better way to do it than to run a personal eCommerce business?

In this post, we discuss exactly how our founder, Shri Kanase, took his own eCom Shopify store to over $1,000,000 in just 12 months with Google Ads. Not only did he utilize both Google Shopping Ads and Google Search Ads, but he used all the strategies he teaches and implements with clients.

Video Transcript

Now, it was no easy journey getting to this stage from the beginning. There were a lot of ups and downs, even with Google which is completely different from Facebook. There were a lot of things I had to adapt to, simply because this was the first real-time I was running a brand new store with Google ads only. Now for those of you that don’t know, I used to be mainly a Facebook ads guy. I had a lot of videos on my channel about Facebook ads but with the Facebook ad account banned and constant issues, I decided it was finally time to just switch over to Google Ads. And I’m proud to say today that that was one of the best decisions I’ve made.

If you’re wanting to get into Google Ads, I have tons of tutorials on that, but in this video, I’m going to show you exactly how I did it — what kind of products I had, how my website was laid out, and give you guys a full rundown of what you can do in order to achieve the same results.

But let’s just get right into it. 

Ecom Store Overview

But I have gone ahead and opened up my Shopify Dashboard for the store which is again running 99% on Google Ads. As you guys can see from January 1st to when I’m recording this video, which is December 6, we have done roughly $856,000. 

However, if you look at the total orders for this store, we can see that it is 1.1 million dollars. About a quarter of a million dollars did go into returns, but that was because most of what was going on in the world when I was scaling (which is around April, May, June). But the store was very very consistent throughout the year, as you can see.

In the low month, it wasn’t really that low, the lowest was around $1,000 to $2,000. Right now, today so far, it has done roughly 4.5k in total sales. I’m going to refresh this for you guys so you guys know that this is 100% real — something that I did not just cook up or just photoshop so it’s getting refreshed right now, as you can see. And 39 total orders with 4.5k in sales. Today we did roughly 6.2k, however, some of the past orders we had to refund so it was minus 1.5k which leaves us with 4.5k.

Advertising Expenses

But now that we’ve gone over that let’s go and go on over to our Google doc to go over the exact strategies and the exact advertising platforms which I used. First things first, we’re going to go over all of the ad spend and all the marketing costs and everything so you guys know how much I actually kept in my pocket.  So if we go ahead and look at the advertising platforms — first things first, Google Ads. I spent roughly $149,000.

Now, you may be thinking that’s a very very low number — this is the highest number when it comes to advertising expenses, compared to the other advertising platforms, which I’ve used and I did use some other ones as well. But as you can see 149k since the beginning, which is right at the beginning of January all the way until now. If we go on to the next advertising platform which I did use which was Facebook ads. And no, I did not use this to test new products; I mostly used it for retargeting. You can see I spent roughly $20,743.76.

Moving on to the next platform, which was Bing Ads, I roughly spent around four thousand dollars on it. Didn’t get too many results compared to the other two platforms, but I definitely did spend a large amount of money on it.

But, if we end up calculating all of the total and everything, the total ad spend was roughly $173,764 for the year, with the total cost of goods of roughly five hundred thousand dollars. Now you may be thinking that that’s a very very big number. Around 50% is often the cost of the goods when it comes to Google Ads. But that is not the only expense I really had, I had other expenses as well. I had three other employees that were working under me so the total miscellaneous expenses including employee expenses and all the other business costs roughly came out to around $17,000 for the total year and this left me with a net profit of around $160,000.

Now, this is not a hundred percent factual data but this is about the profit margin that I did end up with which is roughly 18% maybe even 17% but overall over six figures in profits for the year.

Google Ads Strategy

Now that I’ve gone over the exact ad spend and everything, let’s look at the exact ad strategy I was using for the store. So, first things first, we’re gonna of course talk about Google Ads because again, as I said, the most amount of money went into Google Ads, that’s what I mostly use for the store.

I had two general testing campaigns running for this store and I’m not really gonna go in-depth as to how to set them up what the bid is etc because I’ve gone over them literally a million times in my other videos. But, I had two general testing campaigns running with one smart shopping campaign. 

Smart Campaigns

Now a keynote about the smart shopping campaigns — I only add the products which are already not within my general testing campaigns inside the smart shopping because oftentimes a lot of beginner drop shippers, what they do is they start a smart shopping campaign along with a general testing campaign but both of these campaigns have the same exact products. 

The problem is, Google always gives more value to the smart shopping campaign because in Google’s eyes that’s the smartest campaign available. And Google is the one controlling it so they’re going to, of course, put more value on that over the general testing campaign.

So what happens is the products within that campaign end up spending the most money and your general testing campaign never ends up really spending any money on those same exact products. This is why you want to kind of separate the products which are between these general testing campaigns and these smart shopping campaigns. 

Company Search Campaign

But, in addition to that, I had one company search campaign. Running a company search campaign is simply a campaign that targets those people who search up your store.

For example, if you’re the owner of Amazon, your company search campaign would literally target the keyword ‘Amazon.’ So if somebody types in the keyword Amazon on Google, your search ad is going to come right at the top for that keyword. And that is really important to have because not only does it add a little bit of a trust factor to your customers, but it also puts you at the top in case some other competitor tries to rank along with you. But this is another campaign I had running for this Google ads run the store. 

Scaling Campaigns

In addition, I was running scaling campaigns. Now with scaling campaigns, this is going to depend on per person and per product. You only do this when you have real winning products. So I was only doing this based on the winning products I had running within the store. And oftentimes I would actually notice that these scaling campaigns were actually not performing as well as the product was performing within the general testing campaign. So what I would do is I would go to my general testing campaign and I would just increase the budget or the bid instead of creating a scaling campaign just so I could scale it that way. But that was another way that I was really scaling these campaigns either with the testing campaign or just through the single product campaigns.

Facebook Ads Strategy

Enough of Google, let’s move on to Facebook because Facebook also accumulated a lot of these sales amounts for me. So with Facebook, as I already said, mostly retargeting, which is why I had a really really great ROAS. In fact, I had above a 5.0 return on ad spend with Facebook ads. Again, mostly because of retargeting only. But I had several access running within my retargeting campaign — these were the following ad sets. So I was targeting seven days for viewing content or adding to the cart but not purchased. And there are two options for this. When you go ahead and create a catalog sales campaign on Facebook ads (you should see the screenshot on the screen), I did these time ranges for both of those options. So, in total, I had roughly 12 sets running at the beginning for my retargeting campaign; six of them were for the first option and six for the second option.

But the time periods were the following; 7 days, 14 days, 30, 60, 90, and finally 180. However, if you see, I have made a few bold here and that’s because the 7, 14, and 30 days were the time periods that actually outperformed all these other ones. This is why those were the ones that got me the highest return on ad spend and I ended up shutting down the other ones. 

But this is of course worth a try, you have to try all of these time periods out in order to really know which time period works the best for your store. Because something that works for me may not always work for you. But this was what I was doing in terms of Facebook Ads.

Bing Ads Strategy

Let’s move on to our final advertising platform, which is Bing Ads. Now Bing Ads is actually a big mystery for a lot of people, simply because there are not many tutorials out there. Watch the complete Bing Ads strategy on my channel.

But with the Bing, I had a very general strategy. I didn’t focus too much attention on it because in my opinion, Bing Ads is not the best way to scale because you can get a lot more in sales on Google compared to Bing. In fact, you can expect only about 5% to 10% of your sales, maybe even 20% from Bing Ads. But with Bing, all I did was I imported all of my campaigns, specifically those general testing campaigns from Google, onto my Bing ads account and I lowered the bid significantly. 

So for instance, one of my main general testing campaigns was running at around a 30 cent bid on Bing Ads and this is simply because I noticed with Bing there’s a lot less competition. A lot lower amount of people just using Bing as a platform in general. So that is why we can get away with bidding lower and getting more sales. But Bing ads definitely did help when it comes to getting to this 1.1 million dollar amount with this Shopify dropshipping store.

Product: Different Types

But enough about the advertising platforms, let’s move on to products now because without the products, honestly none of this could have been possible. I’m not going to go in-depth on a lot of the strategies related to products because I’ve made a ton of videos on that already, which you can check out on my channel. But there are a few things I would like to outline.

So, in my opinion, there are two kinds of different products. The first kinds are those products that are consistent trending products, the second kind are the seasonal products. What do I mean exactly by consistent trending products? If you go ahead and look at this first chart right here, you can see that this is a chart that is very very consistent and this is actually within the keywords planner tool for one of the main keywords, which is a bathtub. 

And as you guys can see the keyword has very very consistent search volume. In fact, there’s a lot of other keywords along with the main keyword bathtub, but this is the type of product that usually leads to a lot of six-figure and seven-figure winning products. You wanna find a winning product like this that is consistent throughout the year because what that means is that you can literally sell this at the beginning of the year in January and get the same amount of sales as you would selling it in June or July.

And these, if you really configure the product correctly, if you configure the product page with the right amount of tags and everything, is going to lead to the largest amount of sales. So I normally focus a lot of my energy on trying to find these consistent winning products.

The second type of product is the seasonal product. Of course, it’s very very seasonal, it has its ups and downs — these are the products which you want to add as well. But don’t base your entire business around these kinds of products because in the low months, you will end up not getting enough revenue or enough profits to keep the business running. So these kinds of products just I add on the side and this is why it’s really good to have a general store with Google Ads because you can add both of these kinds of products. 

But if you are able to find a seasonal product just like this, I always recommend that you find and sell this product within the beginning of the season or when it’s just starting to go up. So for instance, this is the chart for the keywords ‘air conditioner.’ As you can see, it starts to go up in late February, early March. That is the perfect time to get within the trend and enlist one air conditioner or multiple air conditioners and make sure to configure it properly. If you go and try to sell this product in July it is too late.

 I would rather you not sell at all within that month. Even though the search volume is at its peak and it’s above 8 million, even into the 10 million range and that’s simply because that is when buying intent really starts to dip down. As you can see August is when it starts to really go down and all the way until October is when it’s basically a debt product and not a winning product.

So if you want to save money, if you really don’t want to end up losing a lot of money testing this product, I recommend that you would find and sell a product like this within the beginning of the month or when it’s about halfway through the season and still selling during that time period because that is, again, the best time to enter. 

Products: Profit Margins

But with the products, it’s important to know what profit margin you should be aiming at because not every product is a real winning product with Google. Some products, even though they’re selling a lot may lead you to a loss. So what should you be looking at when it comes to profit? You want to find a product which is around 25 profit margin after you sell and after everything is covered.

This is one of the biggest mistakes I did with the store simply because I really wasn’t paying attention to this metric. I was just adding products, even if they kind of fell below this metric around 20% or so, and as you can see I only ended up with 18% profits. That could have been into the 30 range if my profit margins were higher overall. So this is what I always follow now try to always be above $25. The more, the better,  just remember that when it comes to the products.

Best Ecom Website Layout

But just having the right products is unfortunately not enough. You have to back that up with the right kind of website. So with the website, again not going to go too in-depth into it, but there are a few things I definitely noticed with this store which led to a lot more sales than a usual dropshipping store. Number One is speed. If you have a low speed and a very buggy website, it’s just not going to work in 2021 onwards, period. 

You want to invest and go on Fiverr or UpWork or wherever you want to go — hire somebody to increase the speed for you because that’s the only way you’re really going to get those people to kind of stay on your website and continue purchasing from you in 2020 and onwards. Especially with Amazon, people really don’t want to wait anymore, so speed has become significantly more important.

Number Two is removing the search bar from the product page. A lot of those websites have that search bar at the top where a person can directly search for something from the product page. This is a big issue and not something I recommend anymore, and I’ve noticed that after I removed that completely my conversion rate went up significantly. That’s simply because the main job of the product page is to get the person to stay on the product page and not go anywhere else. Their main job will be to click that ‘add to cart button to then go into the cart bait. So the search bar kind of takes them off of this funnel and puts them in a different section, which we really don’t want. We want them kind of going down this funnel, so removing the search wire is the best way to go in 2021 and onwards.

In addition, you want to have a trust badge and this is not your general dropshipping scammy trust badge, this is a trust badge outlining your customer service phone number along with an ‘our guarantee section.’ These two things have become significantly more important. I highly recommend you look into both of these and add them to maybe below the ‘add to cart button or at the end of your descriptions. Because that is going to make somebody want to trust you much much more than if you don’t have these things.

In addition, one of the most important things which people get wrong is the review section. I don’t mean just go on AliExpress and import any random review out there because a lot of those reviews are in different languages and they’re not in proper English, That’s just going to throw off a customer if they read that on your website. Instead, you want to kind of copy and paste some real reviews from Amazon. Sure you can have some reviews on your store where there’s no text but have some reviews, especially if it’s a winning product with the text directly from Amazon for that related product. Again, I’ve made a video on how to do this which you can check out on my channel, but reviews are significantly more important, and one reason why I was able to crack this number with mostly Google Ads in 2020.

Products: Fulfillment

Finally, talking about fulfillment because a lot of people don’t really talk about this. This is one of the most important things you can do because getting sales honestly is not the hardest. Fulfilling it on time and making sure the customer is satisfied and not charging back is the hardest thing of all, especially if you’re dropshipping. So with fulfillment, there are two things I did which I changed from my previous years of drop shipping.

Number one with AliExpress, I always choose ‘ships from the USA’. I never really choose ‘ships from China’ anymore because it’s just too slow for me. I want to give my customers a better experience. In addition, I’ve started using eBay much much more to place my orders, again for a better experience. So my orders can ship much faster. Because this is the only way in 2021 and onwards where you’re going to be able to scale long-term and consistently.

But this was exactly How I Was Able To Do Over 1 Million Dollars With Google Ads in the year 2020. Follow me on Youtube for more similar content: youtube.com/shrikanase