Selling high ticket products when it comes to Google ads is one of the best things you can do for your eCommerce brand. Not only do higher priced products help bring added revenue and profits quicker, but they also help increase the brand’s valuation.
A win – win situation if you ask me.
But do it incorrectly and you end up wasting tremendous amounts of time, money, and energy.
So exactly what’s the ideal strategy to go about with when it comes to high ticket eCommerce? How can you grow your brand consistently over a long period of time with such products?
Before we get into the strategic approach for this type of eCommerce brand, let’s first understand a few things.
Common Myths
Before we cover what 99% of the eCommerce world thinks about high ticket products when it comes to Google ads, let’s go back in time a bit.
During the year of 2019 and early 2020, I found my major breakthrough with Google ads. And keep in mind, this was pretty big for me because I was accustomed to Facebook ads prior to this revelation.
In fact, I carried a lot of my Facebook ads baggage, including the product launch tactics, onto Google Ads. This meant I was playing around with lower to mid ticket products for my brand.
And my profit margins suffered.
It was time for change and I had to act fast to preserve my eCom brand during its peak. This is when I began to source higher ticket products and completely alter my running Google ads strategy.
However, this transition wasn’t easy – mainly because I believed in some common myths most eCommerce store owners believe in today.
Some of them included:
- Higher ticket products require more time, effort, and energy to sell
- Higher ticket items require a high level of advertising spend
- It’s difficult to consistently source high ticket items
Not only were these things untrue, but they were also the reason why my eCommerce brand didn’t pivot until a year later. Let’s debunk each one.
Higher ticket products require more time, effort, and energy to sell
One of the most common myths that exists in the eCommerce space.
This was something I only debunked after I actively started running Google ads campaigns for these products. In reality, it all comes down to the strategy.
If you have the wrong kind of strategy, selling a product that costs only $30 will become extremely difficult. The same is true for higher ticket products.
Implementing the right kind of high ticket strategy – the one we’ll be covering in this article – can lead to the right kinds of results long term.
Higher ticket items require a high level of advertising spend
This is true to an extent. A product that costs only $30 might have a cost per purchase of $20 or $15 if you do things right.
On the other hand, something that costs $300 might have a cost per purchase of $100 or $150.
A big difference.
But at the end of the day, having a $150 – $200 margin is much more favorable because it leaves more profit in your pocket and lets you consistently scale.
With $10 to $15 margins, you simply don’t have enough to run a long term and sustainable eCommerce business.
It’s difficult to consistently source high ticket items
Sourcing higher ticket items entirely comes down to the niche you’re in and the companies you contact.
Ultimately, it all comes down to the effort you put in with sourcing and how difficult you make it.
It can take the same level of effort it takes to source and brand a $30 product as it does a $300 product at the end of the day.
Product Identifier Strategy
Any kind of powerful high ticket Google ads strategy doesn’t exist without the right kind of products.
And most eCommerce store owners don’t spend enough time ensuring that their products match certain product metrics. Metrics that give the products validity when it comes to Google ads.
The best kinds of Google ads related metrics I’ve had the most amount of success include:
- 30,000+ average monthly searches
- Less than 4 – 7 competitors for the same product
- More than 3 – 5 relevant keywords popping up
With higher ticket products, the more the average search volume, the better. This is simply because due to the high price, conversion rates will be low.
More traffic flowing to the website makes up for this low conversion rate.
Just checking out the overall search demand and the number of competitors is only part of the equation. Perceived value of any product goes much deeper than that.
The second part of this equation has to do with things like the product image and product pricing. In order to stand out here, you need to check out the kinds of product images your competitors are using.
And I personally have always abided by the “do the opposite of the rest” motto. This means if most of your competitors are using white background images, you need to use lifestyle images and vice versa.
Before putting any given product within a campaign, you need to source the best quality images that can actually make it work.
Otherwise, be ready for high cost per link clicks and low sales.
Launch Strategy
The actual launching strategy is where things change a bit compared to lower and mid ticket items.
With high ticket, on a strategic level, we want to keep a few things in mind.
The first is that while our selling price points may be above average, as long as the niche we’re in and the perceived value of our products justifies these prices, the strategy will work.
In simple words, you can’t sell a simple pencil for $450 unless it has some crazy unique twist to it.
Second, expect to rely more on Google’s algorithm when it comes to the bids. While you may think randomly putting a high bid will work, it can often cause more harm than good.
I’ve personally seen high ticket brands do well with $0.50 cpcs and I’ve also seen them get $2 – $5+ cpcs. It entirely depends on your niche and you won’t know what works unless you test.
In terms of the actual launch strategy, there are two ways you can go about this: new ad account launch or established ad account launch.
Let’s start off with the new ad account launch.
While a smart bidding approach is the best way to go with high ticket, it cannot be implemented directly without previous data. I personally prefer having at least 50 conversions before implementing smart biding campaigns.
In this case, we need to rely on the standard 2:1 launch strategy.
On a strategic level, this involves launching two separate standard shopping campaigns – one at a high bid and the other at a low bid – along with a branded search campaign.
There is no right or wrong bid for these campaigns but for the low bid campaign, I keep it around $0.10.
This strategy on its own is perfect to get the ball rolling and have some data coming in before you take things further.
Once your eCommerce brand gets at least 50 conversions from the Google ads campaigns, you can transition to the established eCom brand strategy.
This is the approach where we begin working more with smart bidding.
From a strategic perspective, launching campaigns for established brands is as simple as creating Performance max campaigns based on certain phases.
Every product has a phase it goes through: testing, profitability, and scaling.
With Performance Max, you might launch one for just those products doing well and another for those you’re testing. This approach lets you cover both sides of the spectrum while ensuring your high ticket products get shown fully.
To be specific, you want one Pmax campaign for the products that got at least three consistent sales and another for those still getting tested. Once we have real winning products (10+ conversions), we launch another Pmax campaign at a high bid just for those.
This type of strategic launch not only lets your products get fully tested, but it also prevents any type of overlap in the long run.
Profitability Strategy
When it comes to high ticket, a solid testing strategy can directly lead to profitability without the need of newer campaigns. But on a strategic level, it’s not ideal to mix products getting tested with those actually bringing in revenue.
This is where our profitability strategy is born.
There are a few key questions you need to answer for your own eCommerce brand before deciding on a strategy.
They include:
- How many conversions have our best selling products generated?
- What is the projected monthly search volume for these products?
- How optimized is our backend for these products?
Not only do these questions lead towards a better approach in terms of strategy, but they also make many things extremely clear.
Things such as whether or not the product is scalable or whether or not your brand itself can support the scale.
Once these things are clear, you can create a custom strategy that suits your situation the best. However, on a general level, I personally start with one major strategy that gets customized based on data.
And this is the Performance Max strategy.
When there are multiple products (more than 5) that have gotten at least three sales in the past 30 days, I create a whole new Performance Max campaign.
This campaign is known as the profitability campaign and contains all those products we identified earlier.
The key here is to run the Pmax campaign without any TROAS set. Setting one right from the get go can lead to unnecessary restrictions which may just destroy the campaign in the long run.
Launching the profitability campaign is the easy part – the hard work begins with the optimization.
Not only does the campaign itself need to be optimized based on the data it gets, but the feed itself for these products also needs to be altered.
Any proper high ticket Google ads feed strategy contains these three major elements for long term growth and scale:
- Relevancy
- SEO
- Depth
Let’s cover each one in detail.
Since these products that you added to the profitability campaign have already shown signs of success, it’s important to get them setup for even more.
And this process starts with relevancy.
It’s absolutely crucial with Google ads to ensure all information you provide in the backend is relevant as can be to your product and to your ideal audience.
This means if you’re trying to sell apples, ensure the keywords “oranges” or “watermelons” are nowhere in sight in terms of the titles or descriptions.
Having them appear when they’re completely irrelevant to what you sell will result in ranking for the wrong keywords, causing more harm than good in the long run.
And this ties directly into SEO, the second pillar of a strong feed optimization strategy for high ticket products.
Not only should you be ensuring the keywords you use within titles and description are relevant, but they should also be getting searched a decent amount of times each.
If nobody is searching with a given keyword, it’s futile to include it within the titles and descriptions. And this is where running standard shopping campaigns is extremely beneficial.
The standard shopping campaigns show you all the keyword related information you need and more, helping make the keyword decisions easier.
But if you don’t have any, don’t fret.
Just research more keywords and include those you haven’t tested yet while getting rid of those that showed little results.
And this brings us to the third pillar: depth.
Depth in terms of how many options are accounted for in the back end is a crucial part of the strategy.
Your high ticket product can’t be considered “optimized” if you haven’t provided:
- Google product category
- Custom attributes
- Detailed product characteristics
- Product identifiers management
These sections can be filled out via any feed app and while not every piece of information can be provided, I do recommend supplying those that you can.
We can only move onto the scaling phase after the backend has been optimized as much as possible.
Scaling Phase
From personal experience, I can say that scaling a high ticket eCommerce brand is much easier than scaling a low or mid ticket brand.
I’ve already covered the main reasons at the beginning of this article but it all comes down to margins.
When you can spend more on ads to get that customer, you automatically give Google ads the ability to reach bigger and broader audiences.
This added reach lets Google use its own data to figure out who’s an ideal audience member and who’s not. But how do you efficiently broaden reach without overdoing it?
You make the scaling strategy as simple as possible.
This means creating and focusing on just one new campaign directed towards products running at scale. But how does this work?
Before doing anything on the campaign side, it’s important to identify real scaling products from the rest.
I personally classify any product that has gotten 10 consistent sales in the last 30 days as a product worthy of scaling. Once identified, it’s time to create a vehicle that can take these products to the next level.
In this case, it’s via a Performance Max campaign. Based on the large accounts we’ve handled over at Yoru Marketing, I’ve come to understand smart bidding is perfect for scaling campaigns.
Again, this goes back to the Google ads algorithm and the power it contains to identify what’s working with what isn’t.
Since this new scaling Pmax campaign was created just for best selling products, it’s crucial that you set as little restrictions as possible on it while starting it at a large budget.
Once things are working and progressing with this campaign, scale will automatically get added to the brand. At this point, it’s a matter of optimizing and working between the strategies to ensure it stays consistent.
Long Term Growth
Once things are working with high ticket products, little interference is needed.
In fact, due to the amount of high ticket brands I’ve worked with under my DTC Google ads agency, I’ve made my team adopt the mantra, “Less is more.”
And this is true on all levels with Google.
While doing less is the way to go with high ticket, this doesn’t necessarily mean you stop doing any kind of optimizations.
To keep long term growth flowing, some things I recommend for your campaigns include:
- Optimizing once every two weeks or so
- Improving SEO of products
- Sourcing more products similar to best sellers
- Interchanging products within campaigns
Optimizing the backend along with the campaigns can further help boost results long term.
Summary
Scaling high ticket products or a high ticket brand in general is no different than scaling any other brand.
With the right strategies and techniques consistent scale can be achieved rather smoothly. But this depends on a variety of different factors.
As described in the article, it all starts with identifying the product and understanding whether it’s actually scaleable in the present and future time period.
Once that’s in the clear, it’s a matter of properly aligning the products based on the phase they’re in (testing vs profitability vs scaling) and placing them in the appropriate campaigns.
Keep in mind the ad strategy is the most important because it determines what kind of results you get overall.
But after a proper ad strategy has been launched, it’s a matter of optimizing on a consistent basis and scaling as needed. No part of this strategy should be rushed in any way.
Working With A Team
We’ve covered a lot in this article when it comes to a solid high ticket strategy. In reality, these things are only the starting points to running a high ticket eCommerce brand at scale.
There are many more strategic approaches that, when applied with this strategy, can scale the brand to the next level with Google ads. Things that are much more advanced.
These are things which you can try implementing on your own or have your current team do it or work with people who are experts in the field.
After turning my own eCommerce brand into a high ticket brand and scaling it to $3M+ with Google ads, I’ve understood a few key things which bring consistent success.
These strategies have been further perfected due to the large high ticket brands I’ve worked with under my Google ads agency.
Let’s work together and create long lasting success for your high ticket eCommerce brand.
While I never guarantee success to any eCommerce brand as no such thing exists in the business world, I do guarantee that I’ll only use strategies which have helped me scale similar high ticket eCom brands.
Schedule a free call with me and let’s scale your brand to the next level.
