It’s easy to say that the health and fitness business has taken off, with total revenues expected to double to $2.3 billion in 2020.
As more people choose to workout at home, gym and sporting goods companies stand to benefit greatly. Additionally, these businesses can reach the proper customers who want to upgrade their home gym by using paid advertisements.
This PPC case study will demonstrate how we assisted an online fitness merchant in streamlining their Google Shopping Campaign and achieving a 5405.85% return on ad spend (ROAS) in just two months!
For information on how we achieved it, continue reading below.
Background
An online fitness retailer contacted us earlier this year with plans to employ sponsored advertising to grow its business and increase sales.
The customer wanted to see more growth after previously working with another agency. They specifically asked us to outperform the Google Ad metrics of the previous firm. Although we were happy to assist, we soon learned that there was a problem that would make it difficult to maximize their campaign.
They couldn’t give us access to their previous ads and weren’t forthcoming with past metrics. We had no historical information because this was a brand-new account.
All we knew was that the store had been averaging a 4X return under the previous agency, which meant they were making $4,000 for every $1,000 spent.
Our team was confident that with a little more effort, we could assist this client.
Building Our Google Merchant Center
Making sure the products are organized, approved, and stand out from the competition is the first crucial stage to a successful paid advertising campaign. We would have to design their entire system from scratch.
Since we had no prior data, everything was initially trial and error, but approximately two months into the campaign, we finally got access to the client’s statistics. (Pro tip: Always examine the analytics account if you have a brand-new ad account with no data. This will at least provide the sorts of campaigns, ROAS, and other important metrics.)
Setting up the Data Feed inside of Google Merchant Center is a step in the PPC campaign setup process.
A data feed is a list of updated details you send to Google about all of your products. A content API can be used to generate a feed, an e-commerce platform can transmit this data, or you can upload products directly to the Google Merchant Center.
Google advises making use of the API if your business lists a lot of products or frequently updates inventory.
We proceeded to manually upload the titles, descriptions, and imagery for this client to the Google Merchant Center because they passed our pre-optimization checklist.
You may be asking why we decided to perform it manually. In the future, we can quickly implement optimization adjustments thanks to this. The advantage of API feeds is that they automatically update any alterations made to the online store.
Our next action was to link the client’s Google Merchant Center with their ad account after the products had been entered. The client’s neatly arranged merchandise would easily route to Google Ads by doing this.
It’s also vital to remember that without initially uploading your products to the Google Merchant Center, you won’t be able to conduct any Google Ads campaigns for them.
Believe it or not, manually entering the product feed was the easy part. Now we had to work on optimizing their new campaigns.
Structuring the Paid Campaigns
After speaking with the client about their goals and expectations, our team settled on three strategies for increasing their revenue:
- Google Shopping Campaign
- Branded Search Campaign
- Dynamic Remarketing Campaign
Unbeknownst to you, a Branded Search Campaign is when you actively bid on keywords associated with your brand. The reseller wanted this type of promotion.
One of our go-to tactics is running Google Shopping Campaigns because they typically have lower cost-per-clicks (CPC) and send us traffic that has already been thoroughly screened. The use of dynamic remarketing campaigns would guarantee that visitors who looked at products but didn’t buy them would see adverts again. Our main objective was to increase website traffic from potential buyers.
There isn’t much complexity to the Google Shopping Campaign. To start, we divided the campaign into two halves and tested each one to see which one performed the best.
In this instance, we started both a Standard Shopping Campaign and an automated Smart Shopping Campaign, which uses machine learning to create ads for us. We’ve discovered over time that Smart Shopping Campaigns work better.
Our explanation for this is that Google’s algorithm enables it to show our products to the appropriate customers. However, we only utilize these intelligent campaign types for shopping and not for lead generation or conventional search advertising.
The purpose of the Branded Search Campaign was to identify anybody who specifically searched for the brand names, regardless of how they spelt them. Additionally, non-converting visitors were collected through our Dynamic Remarketing Campaign.
Optimizing Campaigns
After the campaigns went online, optimization had to begin.
The addition of negative keywords to our basic campaigns is one of our everyday adjustments. These are the terms that will stop the improper kind of search from bringing up your advertisement.
For instance, if your business sells women’s tennis shoes, you might want to add “high heels” as a negative keyword to prevent customers looking for “women’s dress shoes” from seeing your advertisement.
Shopping campaigns don’t allow you to bid on individual keywords, however Standard Shopping Campaigns still allow you to use negative keywords. For this customer, these are a few of the negative keywords we added:
Then, once we have enough data, we can turn off non-performing products. This allows us to target products that are driving new revenue.
a list of the products we put on hold in order to promote more products that would generate more income.
We realized that the Smart Shopping Campaign was destroying the Standard Shopping Campaign after just one month. We normally prefer to collect data for this amount of time before making any significant campaign-related decisions.
The outcomes are displayed below. The conversion value nearly doubled compared to the baseline campaign, and the cost per conversion was lower.
What happened when we paused the client’s standard ad campaigns.
We made the decision to completely halt the conventional campaign and focus all of our efforts on the intelligent campaign.
Other than tracking search terms, daily budgets, and performance, we didn’t have many optimization alternatives for our branded campaign and dynamic campaigns.
The Results
The PPC team allowed it to run with these new optimized settings since they were certain that we were on the correct road for this client.
While exceeding a 4X return was our primary objective for this campaign, we ultimately did so by achieving a 5405.85% ROAS in the second month!
The table below shows how our client’s $1,505.11 in paid advertising yielded an amazing $81,358.36 in additional income.
We were also ecstatic about being able to build an effective campaign from the ground up with no past data to use as a benchmark and help bring our client tens of thousands of dollars in sales over two months.
Conclusion
To provide efficient paid advertising solutions, our knowledgeable PPC team collaborates with clients from a range of industries.
We assist all of our new clients in getting back on track, whether they come to us with disapproved advertising or lack baseline data to base their work off of.
Because each client’s PPC strategy is unique, we are able to do this. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy used by us. Our team develops a strategy that takes into account each client’s particular demands and objectives by following a procedure based on the best practices of paid advertising.
Do you require assistance with paid ad creation or optimization for your online store? To learn more about what we can do for you, schedule a call with a member of our PPC team.