Scaling an eCommerce brand is an art which, if mastered, can really change the life for many.
Unfortunately, most eCommerce brand CEOs, CMOs and other marketing teams lack true knowledge when it comes to scale.
Especially with Google ads.
As a result, they mindlessly click buttons and view colorful charts thinking these things are making a difference.
Does that sound like you?
Don’t worry, I was in the same position back in 2018.
I actually thought I was making a difference clicking things and pretending like I knew what I was doing.
Until I saw the profit and loss statement for the end of the month.
*gasp*
We recently began working with a liquor brand which was facing the same situation with Google ads.
And although their retail and Facebook ads presence helped significantly with sales, true Google ads scale was missing.
They had done $6.4 million in sales during the year of 2022.
And they came to us with the hopes of increasing that by 2x for the year of 2023, mostly with the addition of Google ads as a true sales channel.
And we got to work.
Overview
This liquor brand came to us during the early portion of June with big hopes.
Simply because they faced on major problem with Google ads:
Confusion.
We began work with this brand on June 18, 2023.
At that time, the CEO was the only person handling the Google ads side of things and at the same time, doing 10 different tasks.
It was no surprise the Google ads side of things was a mess.
One day, there would be $3,000+ in revenue from Google.
The very next, barely $400.
The product feed was a mess with a bunch of disapproved products and other Google Merchant Center errors.
And when it came to the strategy, things were essentially nonexistent.
A bunch of random search campaigns running with one performance max campaign, an improper setup.
And to top it off, due to the niche, all the campaigns were plagued with policy violations.
It was time for a change.
Strategy Overview
With any eCommerce brand we take over, we begin work from the foundation up.
Because the reality is, launching and optimizing campaigns is the easy part – it can be done in 5 minutes.
The hard part is ensuring the base is strong enough to support scale.
We worked on fixing all product disapprovals by changing up things such as titles, product identifiers and even the images in the backend.
And during this process, we also worked on improving conversion tracking setup to get better data rolling in.
One key thing we did early on which helped the most was also improve the Google Merchant Center.
Doing things such as adding relevant promos, reviews, free shopping listings, etc.
All done to improve the product feed.
Once the product feed was improved in terms of SEO techniques and images, we moved onto ad strategy.
Strategy Creation
Any good Google ads strategy ensures that it’s getting:
- Cold traffic
- Warm traffic
- Hot traffic
A mixture of traffic that leads to consistency and scale.
When we initially began work with this brand, it had covered only one of the three in detail: cold traffic.
And this could be seen through the random prospecting search campaigns the CEO had running.
Keeping the previously run strategy & niche in mind, we decided on the 2:2 launch strategy here:
- 2 Google Shopping campaigns
- 2 Search campaigns
A fairly simple setup we decided on due to the extensive data the ad account already had.
This is where most eCommerce brands go wrong, however.
Instead of asking themselves key questions such as:
- What kind of traffic flow are we missing?
- Is profitability the main goal right now or is it something else?
- What does our brand need more of?
They launch random campaigns hoping something works.
For any brand we work with, we ask ourselves the 3 key questions from above to understand what direction we want to take the brand.
But once we had understood that this liquor brand didn’t need brand awareness at this point since they were already a 8-figure brand, we got a strategy in place accordingly.
And this eventually led us to the optimization phase.
Optimization Phase
Once things are working, majority of eCommerce brands do one of two things:
- Optimize too frequently
- Barely optimize
Both lead to a devastating downturn in revenue & profitability.
The solution here is to take an approach that’s based on proven techniques.
After spending over $5 million with Google ads in total, we came to realize one thing:
Optimizing every 5 – 7 days is the way to go.
Do it more frequently and the campaign’s algorithm begins to struggle.
Do it less frequently and bad products / keywords begin to eat up budgets.
In terms of the actual optimization strategy, we framed our approach based on the campaigns we had running.
At this point, only Performance Max campaigns were running along with two generic search campaigns.
With Performance Max campaigns, the optimization was more related to the backend.
Apart from excluding products which were overspending without generating profitable sales, we took things a bit further.
We dived deep into the ‘Insights’ section and took apart all keywords which were generating sales.
The main goal here was to incorporate them into product titles and descriptions to make the funnel much stronger.
With search campaigns, we actually had more room to play around.
From all the data that began coming in, we began further optimizing the ad copies with the appropriate keywords that were getting the most traction.
In addition, we did things like:
- Targeting newly ranked keywords within ad groups
- Excluding irrelevant & overspending keywords
- A/B testing between product landing page vs collection page
We began work here on June 18th and by July 18th, we had increased revenue by 82% and bumped up ROAS by 119%.
It was actually time to scale.
Scaling Phase
With Google ads, scaling is often the most sought-after phase when it comes to eCommerce.
Unfortunately, it’s also one of the easiest to screw up completely.
Some potential ways scaling can be screwed up (which we avoided at all costs here) include:
- Increasing budgets and bids too often
- Launching a bunch of meaningless campaigns
- Excluding and optimizing products too often
Unnecessary things which create no real impact or growth.
The approach we took here consisted of two parts.
One of the main goals here was to get more sales via cold traffic search campaigns.
And although the collection and product based search campaigns were providing mediocre results, we wanted more.
To scale that aspect, we completely shut off the two search campaigns and launched a dynamic search campaign at a high budget.
This reduced the guesswork we were doing and got the algorithm on our side.
With that running, we began focusing on the shopping campaigns.
Here, all we really did was increase budgets by 10% – 25% every 5 to 7 days.
Simple and easy.
Naturally, as the algorithm got more data and became smarter, it started to find more of the ideal customers.
But besides these two approaches and the ongoing backend optimizations, we literally did nothing else to scale further.
All the account really needed was the right structure in terms of the foundation and a good approach.
Hiring a Google Ads Agency To Scale Ecommerce Brands
There are a lot of Google ads agencies out there.
And I definitely can’t say Yoru Marketing is the best Google ads agency for every eCommerce brand out there.
But what I can say is that through personal experience with my own brands and our internal projects, we’ve developed strategies that work.
These are some of the things I truly believe sets us apart from the rest of the eCommerce Google ads agencies:
- Walking the walk and talking the talk
As I mentioned earlier, I personally run my own eCommerce brand to this day.
This is how I got into the eCommerce world back in 2017.
And although we work with tens of wonderful brands at this moment, I continue to run my own.
With the sole purpose of testing more strategies and finding better moves.
I purposely do this to ensure I’m testing tactics on my own dime and can continue to relate to all brand CEOs and CMOs we work with.
This really lets me be ahead of the curve and save money and headache for all brands I work with.
- Focus on the metrics that matter
Revenue. ROAS. Cost per purchase.
The three major metrics we follow work off of.
Nothing else.
Too often, you’ll find Google ads agencies boasting about how they lowered the avg cost per link click or the invalid clicks rate or something else.
And although these metrics are helpful overall, they are not those you can deposit into your bank.
All our strategies and goals we create are done with the main business numbers in mind.
- Personalized approach
Lastly, we believe in a custom approach for every single eCommerce brand we work with.
I personally know how it feels to be just another number on the screen working with a multi-billion dollar agency because I’ve been there.
And it sucks.
Your eCommerce brand needs proper attention and the right custom approach to really scale.
Some generic strategies that worked 3 years ago will not cut it.
And that’s what we do.
So if your eCommerce brand does $40,000+ per month and you want to scale it further with Google ads, let’s work together.
Click here to schedule a free call with me and let’s discuss more about your brand.
Even if we don’t work together, you’ll end up getting a free strategy report I personally create so there’s no obligations.
