The smell of victory was in the air as I had just opened my sales dashboard for my eCommerce brand 30 seconds ago.

I took my hand and wrapped it around my own body to give myself a nice and big pat on the back.

We had done it.

Not only had we crossed the million dollar mark with our own personal eCom brand, we had crossed $2.4M in a matter of two and a half years.

That’s about $83,333 on average every single month. 95% from Google ads.

Although I’m the CEO of Yoru Marketing, which runs Google ads for other folks, I’m a Shopify store owner first. That was where I got my start.

Ecommerce store owners always ask me: what makes you or your agency any different from the gazillion of agencies out there?

And my answer is always the same – it’s because we walk the walk and talk the talk. We don’t spend other eCom brand owner’s budgets on testing strategies for our own benefit.

All the testing that happens of any strategy, whether it be for testing products or scaling them, happens right on my own brand. The brand that I have our Google ads agency work on together. 

I’m the guinea pig here.

But it works.

We scaled to $2.5M with this brand at close to a 5x ROAS and I want to cover the strategic approach I took towards making that happen.

Lets begin.

Hawk Eye Overview

I personally started this eCommerce brand back in 2019 during a rough time period of my life.

A time period when I had JUST gotten suspended from Facebook ads and didn’t really know which way to proceed.

All I knew at that time was I did NOT want to keep relying on a source of traffic that could care less about kicking me in the a#$ to boot off the platform.

For basically no valid reason.

To make matters even more confusing, I had little to no knowledge about Google ads or how it worked. I had been using Facebook ads for about 2 years during that time and there weren’t any credible sources to get knowledge from.

Keeping this in mind, I decided to start an “Amazon lookalike” brand.

An eCommerce brand that would sell things ranging from baby toys to sports gear to outdoor camping accessories.

But because I didn’t get any sort of help professionally, my strategies were all over the place. And I guess you could say I made my way into some of the most common pitfalls most eCommerce store owners are currently facing.

Pitfalls With Google Ads

My attempt to try everything in the books didn’t end with just the store.

When it came to launching campaigns to test all the products I had spent time sourcing, I had no clue what was right or what wasn’t. Due to this, I relied on the little info that was out there in regards to testing.

Information that said launching a campaign with manual CPC for testing everything was the way to go.

BIG mistake.

I ended up trying to handle all the bidding on my own and basically guess what the ideal bids would be per product.

Comparing this to the current situation of many eCommerce store owners, nothing has changed. They still find themselves going down this big rabbit hole of strategies only to find them in an uncomfortable situation.

An easy fix for this in the current times would be to follow one strategy by someone you trust and give it at least 21 days before deciding which way you’d like to go. The more time you give something to work with Google ads, the better.

While this was one of the major pitfalls I found myself with when it came to running this eCommerce brand, this wasn’t the only one.

Another major pitfall I fell into was the “pricing war” pitfall.

A pitfall far more dangerous than the previous one.

Pricing wars are essentially when you start competing with your competitors solely based on price. If you find a competitor selling your product for $49.99, you come in with the deal at a $44.95 selling point.

Pretty soon, your competitor notices this and is forced to lower his own prices to anything below what you priced it at. At the end of the day, nobody wins.

During the initial time period when I was solely handling my eCommerce brand without any interference from my team members within my Google ads agency, all I did was start price wars. I didn’t know any other strategy to make things work.

I began to notice that I was getting sales here and there but nothing was really sticking. Worst of all, I was unprofitable.

So if you find yourself in a situation where you’re finding ways to stand out from your competitors, don’t let pricing wars be one of the solutions. There are far greater and profit-generating ways to have this done.

And this brings me to the final pitfall (that impacted my journey tremendously) that I combined with the other 3 initially. The pitfall of making constant campaign and account changes.

Even to this day, I see way too many eCommerce store owners falling for this pitfall. And this is one they’re bringing onto themselves without external factors.

Most eCom store owners that do this are running on the Facebook ads mentality. And technically, they really can’t be blamed.

With Facebook ads, making constant edits and changes is the norm. Actions can be taken much quicker and strategies changed at that same pace.

The fundamental difference between Facebook ads and Google ads, however, is the audience type. With Facebook, you can literally force your ad on someone’s newsfeed and convince them to purchase.

With Google ads, your customers come to you. In order for that to happen, they must already be looking to purchase a similar product.

Due to this distinction, it takes much more time for a Google ads campaign to properly optimize and start generating results. All because there are tremendous fluctuations in daily searches and many other things which impact the algorithm.

The easy solution to this pitfall and one which I always recommend on my channel is to give the campaign 4 to 7 days before optimizing again. The more it understands what change you just did, the better it can adapt and perform accordingly.

While pitfalls have always been a part of the whole process as they can never be fully avoided, dealing with these the right way allowed me to take a strategic approach towards the Google ads campaigns.

Strategic Overview

As mentioned earlier, I had 0 idea what I was doing when it came to the strategy. This caused me to bounce from plan to plan way too often.

One day, I would have a campaign with all my products and the very next day, it would be segregated into different ad groups.

And I still haven’t really figured out why I was doing that during that time period.

But one thing I did know was that I wanted a funnel approach when it came to testing and scaling with Google ads.

This meant I needed to have a select few campaigns that would only be focused on testing while others would be introduced to add scale. And the only way to do that would be by joining Google’s powerful machine learning algorithm with my own bidding strategies.

Testing

If you’re like most eCommerce store owners, you believe in the art of personalization.

One custom, personalized ad copy that is associated with one product which is all stored inside one campaign only. The perfect combo for success with Facebook Ads or Tik Tok ads.

Use that with Google ads and you risk running through your entire budget within a few hours to end up in a big loss.

Don’t get me wrong, Google ads does require a personalized approach in its own way. An approach that ensures a potential customer comes onto your website and actually ends up purchasing something.

But the funnel with Google ads really begins on the image level. And the more product images you have, the better.

What I mean by this is consider having more products and variants per product. The more of these you have, the more auctions you can enter and the greater the chance you’ll win more and rank towards the front.

Every product variant in this case acts as an individual product and we can run shopping ads to these inside one singular campaign.

I won’t get into the exact details here of what settings to run the campaigns at but generally, in the beginning, you want to have two testing campaigns.

• One general testing campaign at a high bid
• One general testing campaign at a low bid

This standard shopping campaign route helps your products get an exposure on a board and narrow level, helping provide a well rounded broad approach. While there are strategies that go into a deeper level, this broad approach paves the path for greater success.

Long Term Growth

With testing out of the way, it was time to focus on scaling. And for this eCommerce brand, scaling involved focusing on a variety of different things, such as:

• Store front (website)
• Backend (foundation)
• Products
• Ads strategy

Lets discuss each one in detail.

Website

Because I knew how a good conversion rate optimized website should look like (due to my semi-successful Facebook ads run brand), getting through this part was a breeze. From my understanding, a conversion rate optimized website was one that had:

• Trust inducing factors (special trust badges, banners, text, etc.)
• Fast load speed
• Relevancy
• Upsells / downsells
• Custom designs / layouts

While I ensured that majority of the techniques that had worked for me with Facebook ads were implemented, I failed to realize one crucial thing;

This wasn’t Facebook.

This was Google. An advertising platform that runs on completely different strategies compared to Facebook. One where you need to attract users and walk them through your funnel.

So while all of the factors above were essential to Google ads success, what was needed even more was simplicity. And it makes sense.

With Google, consumers probably land on your website because they’ve already been wanting to purchase something. There’s no convincing you need to do when it comes to the products.

The website, on the other hand, is entirely different. Not only does it need to be simple and sleek, but it also needs to make it easier for the convinced customer to get what they want.

Without having to jump through any hoops.

Over time, as I began to realize this, I started cutting out the excess additions on the landing page and making things more sleek and professional. But work didn’t end there.

Backend

With things churning and my Google ads campaigns providing superior results (5x ROAS +), it was time to take things to the next level.

Most eCommerce store owners don’t realize how important it is to ensure you have a strong foundation in place. And while this article isn’t about the intricate details of building a strong foundation, here are some things which should be focused on:

• Email Flows
• SMS Flows
• Product Feed Quality
• Google Merchant Center Health
• Landing Page Conversion Rate

Although you might know the perfect Google ads strategy, it is not enough for sustainable and long term growth. Any eCommerce brand works on certain foundational elements that keeps it going.

Based on my eCommerce brand, I noticed focusing on these few key things really made the difference between consistency and inconsistency.

In fact, one major issue I was having prior to really diving deep into these select few categories had to do with cash flow. One day, I would be extremely profitable and the very next, the profits would be cut in half.

And it all funneled down to what I was doing in the backend.

The key here is to make one strategic change at a time in the backend and notice how it impacts ads. Ideally, you want to be letting a few days pass by to monitor and measure results.

Whatever you do, it’s crucial to not let these changes be a one time set and forget type as there’s nothing more destructive than letting a change which lowered your conversion rate stay untouched.

Products

All the strategies out there in the world can’t save you if your product isn’t ideal. And unfortunately, the phrase “You can sell anything to someone in the world with proper techniques” doesn’t necessarily apply here.

Much of my success with this eCommerce brand came due to the products I was selling.

Products I had found through proper research and at the right time. 

And with Google ads, research has more to do with the amount of people searching for a product at any given time in a single month.

For this eCommerce brand, I mainly sourced all products from US suppliers that could ship on time. The type of product didn’t necessarily matter.

What really mattered the most was that we were consistent with it. New products every single day or as often as possible.

On a top-down view, Google ads preferred this and began to perform accordingly. This is mainly because every new product was like a new opportunity for Google to reach a bigger audience.

As reach grew, sales grew as well. But this would not have been possible without the next set of strategie that scaled the brand.

Strategic AD Phases

In total, every product goes through three different phases, regardless of what it is:

• Testing
• Moderation
• Scaling

We went into detail with what strategy this brand followed when it came to testing above. And every single product followed the same techniques as mentioned here.

Once the product had proven itself, it was time to take that into the moderation phase.

This phase is where we begin to heavily focus on the profitability aspect. Essentially, this means that the backend for that given product will be improved significantly.

Things ranging from the product image to the SEO techniques to the merchant center feed details. Not only do these help make the product more targeted, but they also help when we proceed onto the third phase.

In terms of campaign strategy, most of the products in phase two can stay within their original testing campaigns or be moved to another smart bidding based scaling campaign.

But once that transition happens, products officially enter the third phase.

In standard terms, scaling is all about increasing the revenue as much as possible. But for my own eCommerce brand, I slightly altered the definition.

For me, scaling was increasing the revenue at a profitable rate as much as possible. This ensured I wasn’t going overboard and actually losing money while increasing sales.

Most eCommerce brands get this wrong. They get so honed in on the revenue side of things that they forget about what’s happening to cash flow.

Fortunately, while following proper techniques, I was able to take majority of the products through each of these phases to reach those desired levels.

And to scale it even further, I involved team members from Yoru Marketing to focus on making the entire approach even better. These things included GA4 upgrades, enhanced conversion tracking installation, and more.

Since everything with this brand was a funnelized approach, things flowed efficiently and there was less stress overall on all of the systems. Something most eCommerce brands unfortunately fail to do.

Google Ads + Strategy = Your Action Plan For Creating Havoc In The Market

Phew.

We’ve covered many details about what it took to scale this eCommerce brand to over $2.5M in a matter of two and a half years.

The main point you need to understand is; Google ads is only part of the puzzle when it comes to finding long term success with your eCommerce brand.

And many of the things you need to get right, such as the landing page experience or product funnel quality, directly impact your store’s growth. On all levels.

When your eCommerce brand takes a collective approach towards scale, things begin to connect with one another properly. But in order for that to happen, you need to know what you’re doing.

Lets Work Together

If you’re an eCommerce store owner, chances are good that you’re having trouble managing everything all on your own. Or the people you hired to manage all these things are the same ones who aren’t doing things properly.

Things are all over the place and you’re just not growing your revenue or profits at the pace you’d like.

While many things must get done all at the same time, the one thing that should never be “half done” is ads. Your Google ads campaigns are the reason your sales push on.

So if you’re doing $30,000 or more per month and need help scaling to the next level, schedule a FREE strategy call with us. You get to keep the strategy report even if we don’t work together.

Lets crush it together.