[Google Ads Case Study] How We Grew A Kitchen Ecommerce Brand’s Sales By 136%

A while back, an eCommerce brand in the kitchen accessories niche approached us to get help with growth through Google ads.

Before they reached out to us, they had been trying and struggling on their own to make things work.

To get back to the levels they had originally been at during the pandemic. But no matter what they did, ad costs would rise dramatically, creating a big pool of lost profits.

Working with a Google ads agency was the last thing on the owner, Himanshu’s mind as this was a slowing period for his business. A period most business owners would rapidly cut costs in.

Now, every brand that comes to work with us often comes with its own unique set of problems. Unique in the sense that the eCommerce business has usually never been able to fully conquer it.

But one thing most eCommerce business owners fail to realize is having a set of proper strategies and systems in place can cure about 99% of problems regardless of how ‘unique’ the business may seem.

And such was the case for this Kitchen accessories brand.

Foundational Errors: Troubleshooting Issues

It’s no secret that having a strong foundation is extremely important for the overall success of an eCommerce brand.

And it’s no different when it comes to Google ads. The foundational pillars start with having a functional backend and conversion tracking codes.

The first goal we had once we began work with this eCommerce brand was to identify all issues with tracking that could cause the drop in sales.

And you’ll be surprised to know that about 98% of eCommerce brands I’ve spoken to in the past 5 years have had conversion tracking code issues.

Improper tracking. Data all over the place. No real assurance that everything is actually accurate.

Doesn’t matter if the brand is new or if it has millions of sales.

For this Kitchen eCom brand, the harsh reality was conversion tracking was not installed properly. This meant a lot of faulty data.

One thing most eCommerce brand owners don’t realize is that the impact of faulty data goes far beyond the analytics and attribution; it hampers campaign performance.

All campaigns within Google ads use this data to make decisions. Things such as what the ideal demographic of your audience member is. Or what city they live in. Or what their interests are.

Basically decisions that impact who the ads are actually shown to. Due to this, it becomes extremely important to feed the algorithm proper data to ensure the ads are shown to the right audience.

Luckily, this eCommerce brand had properly installed Google Analytics and this let our Google ads agency conduct the necessary actions needed to begin strategizing.

Google Ads Growth: A Strategy Overview

Once upon a time, creating a strategy for Google ads simply meant launching a few standard shopping campaigns at varying bids.

And frankly, competition was at a much lower level overall during those golden times. This meant low bids and a few campaigns were enough to scale profitably and quickly.

Do that now and you risk either overspending and going in a full loss or underspending and halting growth.

When we began strategizing for this eCommerce brand, we knew a simple yet new approach would be needed for steady growth.

After all, the owner had been a follower of my Youtube channel for quite some time and that meant he had already tried many of the strategies I teach. It was time to bring on Google’s algorithm to regrow the brand.

Before I go into the details of our main strategy and why we even used it in the first place, it’s important to understand what had already been tried as you might be in a similar situation.

There were multiple different standard shopping campaigns and single product ad group campaigns running within the brand without any clear direction.

The bids were running way to high – about $0.64 cpcs – and the campaigns that should have been shut off long ago were still pumping out ad spend, causing a dip in ROAS.

As we did further research, however, we came to realize that these bids were actually too low. There were just too many competitors in this market for the brand to bid at these levels profitably and Google was having trouble showing the ads to the right audience as a result.

While this manual approach might have been ideal to get the store off the ground, it was not something they could run much longer, especially since they had already crossed $300,000 in sales during this time.

Transitioning The ‘Smart Way’

Keeping all of these things in mind, I knew the way to go was with a smart shopping campaign. There was just too much data for me to not utilize Google’s smart algorithm.

And it showed great momentum right from the beginning.

Many eCommerce brands fall into the trap of analysis paralysis and try to perfect everything. Such was the case with this eCommerce brand.

While trying to perfect their bidding strategies and other things, they failed to realize that the ideal bid for the products they were selling was nowhere close to $0.60 – it was at $1 and above.

While these bids might seem a bit intense for many eCommerce brands, you need to realize that Google’s algorithm can figure these things out extremely well. When you have tons of data, this process becomes 10x easier.

And while $1 might seem a bit too high, profitability is what should drive the decisions.

In this case, the profitability was through the roof simply because there were some days the smart shopping campaigns were getting a 16x ROAS – something the brand had never seen before.

The reality is, any eCommerce brand can achieve such results from smart shopping campaigns. What’s necessary is a little bit of data and the right kinds of products.

Some questions you can ask yourself before transitioning your current marketing efforts to smart shopping include:

• How many sales has Google ads generated in the last 30 – 60 days?
• Are all of our conversion tracking codes firing up to the 99% accuracy level?
• Are all my product pages as good as they can be to utilize Google’s smart algo?
• Have I found my major winning and losing products?

The answers provide a clear breakdown of whether the eCommmerce brand is actually ready or not for smart shopping campaigns. We had answered these questions prior to the implementation of smart shopping with this brand and here’s what we realized.

This brand had already gotten roughly 2,172 conversions in total, which meant there was a lot of data to work off of. The first thing we did was improve conversion tracking issues and basically eliminate them, which meant everything would be tracked. Product pages were an ongoing process for this brand, as it should be in general and there were winners and losers here.

However, in order to get the best results possible consistently with smart shopping, we knew the product pages had to be improved a bit. And this brought us to the backend optimization process

Paving The Path With SEO

Many eCommerce store owners believe that SEO is only useful for organic search and traffic. As a result, they disregard it completely.

This often becomes one of the biggest factors that contribute to the mediocre results of their Google ads campaigns.

While SEO can be the main driving force towards tons of organic traffic, it’s also one of the main reasons why many Google ads advertisers end up paying less.

We covered this in the optimization article we wrote but simply put, the more SEO techniques you follow, the more you help Google’s algorithm identify the right audience for your brand. This leads to lower CPCs and higher CTRs, directly impacting the number of people coming onto your website.

Because I had SEO improve my Google ads results drastically for many of my own eCom brands, I knew that was the next step for this brand as well.

That meant doing full keyword research to help change up the titles and descriptions, which were geared more towards Facebook ads.

But it’s important to understand that improving the titles and descriptions doesn’t have to be a long and rigorous process. Ecommercre store owners often push this part under the table because they feel the work needed here is monumental and bound to take a long period of time.

This could not be further from the truth.

Improving the titles and descriptions could be as simple as adding the brand name at the very end via the Google Merchant Center. Or it could mean adjusting the titles and descriptions of only the winners.

And it’s extremely important that this step is done properly.

After all, we can only really start identifying the results of the campaigns once we know that everything else is properly setup.

Optimize & Scale

Things were looking promising, as they often do with smart shopping campaigns. Morale was high and everybody wanted to continue this momentum.

With Google Ads, momentum is achieved by touching less of what’s working.

That might sound extremely counterintuitive – fully wrong, even – but this is what simply works. And because most Google ads advertisers aren’t able to understand this concept, they end up destroying what was once working.

The reason as to why this actually happens is a bit more complex.

Google’s algorithm is consistently optimizing and trying to figure out the ideal audience for your campaigns. Every single big change pushes the algorithm to the beginning of this phase as it now has new information to work with.

Doing this once or twice a week won’t cause any major issues but do it too often and the campaigns simply break. They end up going so far back in the optimization process that they have no choice but to take a completely new road towards optimization.

And often, this means showing the ads to an audience that might not be as ideal as the original.

For this eCommerce brand, we took a bit of a laid back approach.

There was only one new smart shopping campaign launched during the initial phase – a campaign designed to run for the winners.

And the only thing we did within this campaign every seven days or so was to exclude the bad products.

These products included those that had crossed profit margins without a sale. Nothing else. But the major method that contributed to the success of the optimizations was the BBAK method.

• B: Bids – This stands for all the optimizations with bids that must be done to preserve the results.
• B: Budgets – The most crucial part of scale and growth. While it entirely depends on the advertiser, having a decent budget is necessary to test products and ads fully.
• A: Audiences – The actual people your ads get shown to. With smart shopping campaigns, this is not something we can control along with bids and budgets.
• K: Key Performance Indicators – These are all other running parameters of the ad that determine the overall performance. They can be keywords, product groups, locations, etc.

The BBAK method is something most eCommerce brands don’t know about. And as a result, they end up making random changes on a random given day.

Ideally, you want to be implementing the BBAK method on one day within the week and giving about four to seven days for the campaign to optimize again.

This is exactly what we did for this Shopify store.

While this campaign was optimizing and running in the background, we continued to strategize and create skeletons of other campaigns we wanted to launch, such as another smart shopping campaign for testing products.

No other major actions were getting taken within the first month – and for good reason. This was the first major month the ROAS and revenue was showing signs of improvement, both at the same time.

It was time to press hard on the gas pedal and grow.

Steady Growth

Oftentimes, those that begin using Google Ads after transitioning over from Facebook ads or Tik Tok ads believe that growth means overnight.

They believe that doubling or tripling budgets and creating duplicating campaigns is what Google needs to move the needle.

And this is where they go wrong.

The bottom line is that growth with Google ads happens at a much slower rate compared to majority of the platforms. And when you think about it, it makes sense.

With Google ads, your audience must come to you after they search for your products. There’s no real way for you to force people to search for them.

This means if there’s only a total search volume of 5,000 for the product you sell, you simply cannot force 10,000 people to come and buy your product.

It just doesn’t happen.

So keeping this in mind, we followed our proven scaling framework for smart shopping campaigns. This included keeping the target ROAS box fully unchecked to prevent putting  cap on Google’s scaling potential and increasing budgets every four to seven days by 20%.

Something else we began doing as results started to snowball was to launch more smart shopping campaigns for different things. For example, we had a winners and products untested smart shopping campaign going.

In addition, we began launching search campaigns around certain categories that were starting to get results. This is something I don’t see many eCommerce brands doing and they end up putting their brand in a dangerous situation.

If one campaign suddenly stops performing, the entire account can go in a total loss.

On the other hand, if you have five or 10 different campaigns to begin with that are performing at the expected levels, the situation becomes a lot less worrisome.

The best way to maximize ROAS and safeguard your eCommerce brand is by approaching in an extremely broad way that keeps sales coming in from different directions.

Hiring a Google Ads Agency To Scale Your Ecommerce Brand

There’s way too many Google ads agencies out there.

And I can’t say Yoru Marketing is the best Google ads agency for every time of eCommerce business out there.

But I can definitely say that we’ve been able to hone the craft of building and scaling eCommerce brands to unimaginable heights.

Prior to launching my Google ads agency, I used to mostly run my own eCommerce brands, especially with Google ads. This gave me direct insight into what was working and what wasn’t.

The process of growth when it came to our own internal strategies was actually boosted even more once my team under my Google ads agency started working with bigger brands. And after working with over a dozen different eCommerce brands in different niches, we’ve been able to perfect our strategies even more to work in any industry.

There are several things we do which really sets us apart from the rest of the Google ads eCommerce agencies out there.

Focus on business metrics that matter

Simply put, your eCom brand’s growth is what matters to us. We’re your partners in this relation, not just some external contractors you bring on to do quick work.

We know we’re here to provide as much scale as possible while maintaining the desired profits and revenue. 

As a result, we begin every engagement by trying to understand the core situation of the business and how it’s impacting the current situation. A strong foundation is key to any eCommerce business and our main goal is to determine how strong this really is and where it needs the most work.

This analysis really helps focus on metrics such as revenue, overall profits, and month over month growth – the numbers that actually mater.

Deep funnel expertise

We know that success with any advertising platform is directly connected to the layout of the actual funnel. After all, the funnel is the main foundation which drives growth for the brand.

The good thing is, we understand funnels at a strategic level.

Effective Google ads strategies depend on how the customer’s journey is, from the moment they land on the landing page to the moment they enter their credit card info to purchase. Every single step directly impacts the conversion rates with Google ads.

And all the backend help we provide is done to improve the funnel, which directly impacts the growth we drive with Google ads.

Ecommerce Google Ads Sales Expertise

Running my own eCommerce brand really gave me a clear idea of how much goes into building a brand from the ground up.

And every single team member who joins our Google ads agency is aware of this process because at some point, they’ve run their own brands as well. We know that profits is more important for the success of a brand than just revenue.

And all our efforts go towards hitting those profit targets rather than just revenue numbers.

Because while big revenue numbers can look very sexy on the screen, they are not the building block of a successful business. 

After all, we’re growth partners with our clients and we’re here to grow the eCommerce brand as much as possible.

Otherwise, what really is the point?