How We Grew A Health Ecommerce Brand By 42% With Google Ads

The sheer power of Google ads and its ability to drive results once established never fails to amaze me.

And trust me, I’ve ran a lot of different eCommerce brands in a variety of different niches. Both personal brands as well as for clients under my Google ads agency.

Every single time, with proven strategies in effect, I’ve seen Google ads not only grow the business over time and keep it consistent, but also do that at a profitable rate.

And this was the case with the brand we’re covering today – Hexo Care.

An eCommerce brand which only sold health related products within the United States and Canada. A brand with a special story.

Lets go back to the beginning prior to our entry.

The Beginning

The start of this eCommerce brand dates back to the turmoil filled months of early 2020, specifically June. With no previous eCommerce knowledge in hand and just money saved from his job, Mikkel started on his eCommerce journey.

Little did he know how fruitful this would turn out to be for him.

Because he didn’t know much about Google ads during that early time period, he decided to take the full plunge into Facebook ads.

Within a period of three months, the store was already doing $150,000+ per month. Through a lot of testing early on and the time period (everyone was at home shopping), Mikkel was able to get lots of success.

However, this would soon prove to be short term.

Early April of 2021, about nine months after he had found his first winning product, the sales came to a sudden, screeching halt.

Hexo Care came back down in total sales volume as quickly as it had gone into a level of scale. Times looked tough.

And this marks the pivotal time period for a lot of eCommerce stores out there.

Many reach this level of slowness and immediately jump to the worst possible conclusions.

“I’m not made for this.” “My eCommerce brand wasn’t designed for the long term.” “I suck at ads.” – Common thoughts that race through an eCommerce store owner’s mind, causing them to completely give up.

And it seemed quite similar with Mikkel in this scenario.

Flash Forward

8 months later…

The eCommerce brand had still not found another massive winner like it did. Sales were down. Morale was low.

Mikkel knew it was time to take Hexo Care on a whole new journey. It was time to pivot.

This step is extremely important for eCommerce brands that JUST focus on Facebook ads. But most skip over this completely.

I know I did. For weeks after I got my fashion eCommerce brand’s ad account suspended, I was doing everything I could to get back on track.

New ad accounts. Family member’s Facebook profiles. New cards. Everything in the book, I did as well.

It didn’t do much besides waste a lot of my time and energy I could have used to continue moving forward.

Fortunately, Hexo Care didn’t have to go through the same turmoil filled time period as I did. Mikkel immediately began to look into and research about Google ads.

An advertising platform that seemed much more promising and which didn’t just make it seem like winning with eCommerce was all about the next winning product.

He found my Youtube videos on Google ads early on in 2022 and after devouring literally every single video, started his first initial campaigns.

The campaign structure he used was fairly simple: two standard shipping campaigns that were his general testing campaigns and one branded search campaign.

The basic launch strategy I recommend and currently use for majority of the brands we work with.

And the amazing thing about this strategy is that it works perfectly well for service based businesses and for lead generation campaigns. Instead of shopping, we normally strictly launch search campaigns following similar criteria for those.

With the launch of these standard shopping campaigns, his sales were off to greater numbers once again. Things seemed to be working, at least temporarily.

But there was one major problem with Hexo Care Mikkel was unaware of during that time; the landing pages sucked. Badly.

There was no type of proper layout done for them that could get the brand sales from somebody browsing on Google. It was definitely more suited for Facebook ads buyers.

If that wasn’t enough, the products had no type of SEO work done to them. And many eCommerce store owners don’t realize this but in order to scale profitably with Google ads, SEO is a MUST.

Period.

SEO not only helps make it easy for the algorithm to understand what the product is and who to show the ads for, but it also lowers important conversion metrics like cost per link clicks (CPCs).

And a reduced CPC simply means more visitors on the website for a lower level of ad spend – a pretty big win.

Since Mikkel had little to no idea about these things, he was applying the Facebook ads mentality to Google ads. Unfortunately, many eCommerce store owners fall victim to this even today.

But this specifically meant he was optimizing campaigns on a daily basis (a BIG no with Google ads) and creating landing pages for a quick sale. While he was getting some results, he was nowhere close to the level of scale or profitability he once had.

Things weren’t progressing and he was losing hope once again.

Fortunately, instead of quitting like last time, he decided to take action and on the 6th of April in 2022, we began our partnership.

Hexo Care and Yoru Marketing.

The Initial Setup

Like all of the brands we work with, Hexo Care went through our initial setup period as well. This period usually lasts about 7 to 10 business days and is when we spend the time to setup the backend properly and ensure everything is optimized for Google ads.

While majority of the things in the backend were installed properly, one major issue was still prevalent; conversion tracking installation.

It’s super important eCommerce brands and any other service based businesses with a website get this right because this determines everything.

The type of visitors you get. The audience your ads optimize for. And ultimately, the level of scale you achieve.

It works this way because Google ads is a search based platform; your customers come to you after doing a search and not the other way around. Simply put, the algorithm needs to be on your side. 

And until we fixed conversion tracking issues, the algorithm would not benefit Hexo Care in any way, shape or form.

So we got to work.

Our team members are quite experienced with ensuring proper installation of conversion tracking codes and everything takes place so it did not take much time to fix this up.

After reaching a full resolution with conversion tracking codes, we moved onto understanding the business as a whole. This included the brand USPs, identity, KPIs, and more.

We’ve created special spreadsheets to aid with this process and make it easy for our partners to provide us this information without spending too much time.

And this brought us to the next phase of launch.

Strategizing

Once all the necessary information is provided, we begin our strategizing. For Hexo Care, this meant working through all the old campaigns and figuring out what was working and what wasn’t.

While many of my strategies had been tried on this ad account, there were key things missing from each that prevented it from reaching its full potential. Add in the issues with landing pages and feed optimization and things were just performing at a very low level.

So far, all we really knew was who the target audience was for the brand and what hadn’t worked in terms of the campaign. We had to use just this information alone to recreate a new strategy to approach the account.

What I saw was that despite the improper conversion tracking, there was a lot of data captured within this ad account. The best way to go about with Hexo Care would be to use this data to its advantage.

And an ideal strategy for this that no other could beat was the smart shopping route. 

That’s exactly what we did.

Launch & Grow

All we really did in this situation was to convert those standard shopping campaigns into smart shopping campaigns.

Three to be specific: one general testing smart shopping campaign, one winners smart shopping campaign and one branded search campaign.

Since there was a lot of previous data on this account, there were also products which had some sales here. Enough sales to classify them as “semi winners” and put them inside their own campaigns.

And that’s exactly what we did.

I’ve talked often about the different bidding strategies and how Google just prefers accounts which are running either smart shopping campaigns or performance max.

And in this case, the Google ads algorithm ended up favoring the short change we did. Not only did the overall ROAS increase from a 1.5x to a 2x+ in the first few weeks alone, but the sales volume steadily began to increase as well.

Our testing phase normally lasts 3 weeks and this is the time period when we see what the ad account is responding to the best. By the end of the third week, Hexo Care had stabilized at a 3x ROAS, which is exactly what Mikkel wanted.

It was time to scale the Google ads campaigns to the next level.

Scaling With Google Ads

Most eCommerce or service based business owners think of scale as this magical period where nothing but positive things are happening.

More ROAS. More revenue. More cash flow.

Unfortunately, that’s now how the real world works. Scale often brings about a sacrifice of one of the main metrics; ROAS.

The return on ad spend is the #1 metric affected as we begin to spend more because as we increase ad budget per campaign, we also begin to expose our ads to a greater number of audience members.

And often times, these new audience members may not be the best quality. This causes the ad spend to increase with decreasing returns and the more you scale, the more this becomes prevalent.

With Hexo Care, we waited until the ROAS had gone past a 3x consistently as the break even ROAS for this brand was around a 2x. This left us with ample room to scale before the ROAS dropped to that level where it wouldn’t make sense to scale.

So every seven days or so, we’d go in and optimize the campaigns while scaling. Optimizing on its own is an extremely big topic but to keep things simple, this meant excluding products which crossed our profit margins without a sale and others with low CTRs.

It also included feed optimization and ensuring we were running the products doing well at their maximum capacity.

But overall, this eCommerce brand responded extremely well to the strategies we originally implemented and we didn’t have to do much testing as a result. The only real testing done was with search campaigns.

We tried things like dynamic search campaigns and collection based single keyword ad group campaigns (SKAGS) but the ad account responded only to the SKAG campaigns. We prevented much further testing after this as our main goal was profitable growth.

We achieved that steadily over the two month period and grew the brand from $10,000 per month essentially to $23,000+ per month.

But how did the future really look for this eCommerce brand?

Future

The month of June proved to be a bit shaky for Hexo Care. But that’s essentially what happens during the beginning of a recession.

Ad spend decreases. Sales decrease. Impressions decrease.

Fortunately, the smart shopping campaigns are able to do most of the heavy lifting with Google ads. 

The algorithm is especially smart.

It can detect when things go up and down with CPCs and the overall advertising auctions. As a result, it adjusts accordingly.

Although the sales pretty much doubled for Hexo Care in a short period of time profitably, there is still a lot of growth left for the brand.

Work With Us

From what I’ve learned so far, there’s just a lot of moving factors with Google ads.

While running an eCommerce brand or a service based business, there are many things you’re focusing on to grow the brand. From dealing with angry Karens to working with suppliers who keep delaying orders, there’s a lot to handle.

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed or aren’t achieving the level of growth you’d like, we’re here for you. We work with eCommerce brands and service based businesses doing $25,000 to $30,000 or more per month and help them scale with Google ads and PPC.

And beginning work with us is as simple as scheduling a call with us, going over the juicy strategy plan we create, and starting implementation of everything.

Lets work together.