Introduction:

This client of ours sells fashion accessories & bags to the big 5 markets. While they handle their Paid Social ads inhouse, we’ve been in charge of managing, optimizing & scaling their paid search PPC campaigns for the past 14 months.

What’s amazing is we also saved this client from going underwater with this performance. They reached out to us after being disabled from FB ads for accidentally violating a policy and had trouble recovering their ad account.

We showed them that, while Facebook is an amazing traffic source, being overly dependent on them and keeping all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea.

Now, even after getting their ad account back, they’ve been spending more on Google than FB just because the returns are stronger, and results are more consistent.

Over the past 14 months, literally hundreds of different campaigns, ad groups, ads, experiments & split-tests have been carried out. It would take far too long to go into every minute detail, so we’re going to breakdown & discuss the 3 biggest needle moving optimizations that helped us to achieve these results so you can apply them in your own business!

Google Ads Case Study – Let’s Dive In!

Needle Moving Optimization #1 – International Advertising /Cross-Border Selling

We usually start with the SIMPLEST of optimizations that so many account owners just never think to do.
Like not advertising internationally even when they can ship internationally.

Literally the most expensive place on Earth than you can advertise in, is in America.

By far.

And while we still usually get great ROI when advertising in America, we often see EVEN BETTER ROI when advertising in other major buying markets, because the amount of competition is on average disproportionately lower.

So starting with step one of “easy” things to do we started by getting their feed approved for the international markets.

This is a great scaling opportunity if you have the fulfillment capacity to send worldwide.

A lot of the markets outside of the Big 5 (US, CA, UK, AU, NZ) are significantly lower in competition, but have the buying power to buy your products. This means click prices are cheaper, and CPA’s are often a fraction of what they are in the big 5 markets.

Sure it gives you a few more ad groups to keep an eye on an optimize, but it’s 100% worth the effort.

The drawback is conversion rates tend to be lower on this traffic, and it doesn’t tend to bring in as much volume, but if your click prices are only 20-40% of what they cost in the US like they were in this client’s case for example, you really have nothing to lose.

In other words, even though the conversion rate of the traffic is often lower, the click prices more than offset the costs which makes it a HUGE net positive.

It makes a big difference to your overall ROAS by the end of the month.

Needle Moving Optimization #2 – Advanced Shopping / Product Structures & Micro Level Optimizations

Another HUGE needle mover for this account was implementing different Shopping campaign structures and applying micro-level optimizations such as automated bidding strategies.

When we first jumped into the account, they were only running an All products Performance Max campaign which was operating around break-even ROAS.

Upon diagnosing it further, we could see there was no product segmentation at all, and most of the spending was actually being allocated to products that were unprofitable.

They were losing thousands every single month by not diving deep into the product listing data and making optimizations there.

So we excluded all unprofitable SKU’s from spending, and completely restructured their Shopping ads structure with our preferred Shopping structure and set it up like the following:

• TOF (top of funnel) – Standard Shopping with Manual Bidding – New Product Testing (Goal here is to test products, collect data, and move winners into their own scaling campaigns)
• TOF – Performance Max w/ Target ROAS bidding strategy – Best Performing Collection A
• TOF – Performance Max w/ Target ROAS bidding strategy – Best Performing Collection B
• TOF – Standard Shopping w/ Target CPA bidding strategy – Winning Product A
• TOF – Standard Shopping w/ Target CPA bidding strategy – Winning Product B

From here with a strong foundation set, scaling was easy. Just implementing our most basic approach pushed us into the neighborhood of a 3.5X+ ROAS and that was even before we started making any MAJOR optimizations.

With the optimal foundation laid out, and campaigns profitable it was time to scale. We began scaling budgets on our campaigns by 20-30% every 48 hours to not reset the learning phase for the PMAX campaigns, while also testing new campaigns like Search & Youtube Ads to diversify our strategy.

Needle Moving Optimization #3 – Diversifying your strategy with different campaign types & placements

One of the things we love most about the Google Ads platform is the variety of different campaign types, placements and ads that you can run for your business, and they’re always adding more! Search ads, Shopping ads, Gmail, Youtube, Display network, it’s such a diverse platform with so much potential to reach new prospective customers for your business.

We’re often asked which are the most effective for eCommerce businesses so here are some of the most effective campaigns we’ve tried across dozens of different businesses and recommend testing out for your store.

1) Dynamic Search Ads

This is a completely automated search campaign which uses either specific webpages from your website, or you can select some of Google’s in-market audiences to deliver the ads to.

They’re revolutionary in the search engine marketing world because unlike traditional search ads where you need to do keyword research to identify which search terms are best to target for your store, Dynamic search ads just analyze your website content similar to how Shopping ads work, and automatically matches it with the most relevant search terms from there.

They even write your ad headlines for you. All you need to do is specify the webpages/audiences, write the ad description and Google handles everything else.

Just like with all automated campaigns, you need to carefully monitor which terms you’re ranking on and make sure it’s relevant by using negative keywords or exclusions, but these are a low maintenance, easy to setup campaign that is worth testing for any ecommerce business!

2) Smart Display Ads

This is another one of Google’s new automated campaign types, except it’s for Google’s Display network. Traditionally you’d need to select where you want your ads to appear, and to what audiences, but with Smart Display Google completely automates this process and the algorithm will automatically test, learn & optimize your display ad placements.

It even automates the creative, ad copy and bidding. So all you really do is setup the campaign and what budget you’d like it to spend. It also integrates with your product data feed so you can show dynamic product ads to previous website visitors and retarget them with the exact product they were viewing on your website, which tends to work really well.

Google’s goal with these Smart Display ads was to combine prospecting & retargeting campaigns all into one. So instead of an advertiser needing to setup & manage multiple display campaigns, Smart Display made it easier to setup and manage a diverse Display campaign strategy.

Smart Display is definitely worth testing for your ecommerce store, it’s performance can vary from one business to another, but we’ve personally seen some good results implementing it with dynamic product ads alongside Smart Shopping campaigns that already have some momentum.

The only time we wouldn’t recommend it is if you’re only planning to prospect, or to just retarget. It’s meant to be a holistic display campaign which combines both prospecting and retargeting to see the best results.

Google will tell you Smart Display can help you get up to 20% more conversions from the same budget, but that’s coming from Google. Ultimately you want to test this out for yourself as every business/brand/product is unique, and what works for someone else may not be the best strategy for your unique circumstances.

3) Performance Max Ads

Performance Max campaigns are an automated alternative to traditional Google campaigns, leveraging Google’s increasingly powerful algorithm, fed by extensive daily data collection. These campaigns simplify complex setup processes, making them ideal for advertisers new to Google Ads by automating both campaign setup and ongoing management.

Uniquely, Performance Max combines Search, Shopping, YouTube, and Display placements into a single automated campaign. When using Performance Max, it’s crucial to pause standard Shopping and Display retargeting campaigns to prevent conflicting sales attribution, unless your product segments are clearly separated.

Google promotes Performance Max even for new accounts, but it actually performs best when an account already achieves at least 30 conversions per month. We typically see excellent results during scaling phases, where it often surpasses manual bidding strategies. Performance Max also demonstrates stability, showing less sensitivity to budget adjustments and performance fluctuations.

However, there are some significant drawbacks. Performance Max provides very limited insights into search terms and ad placements, making it impossible to add negative keywords and avoid unwanted spending. This lack of visibility can quickly lead inexperienced advertisers to waste significant budget on irrelevant search terms.

Additionally, Performance Max doesn’t allow for product-level bid adjustments or manual CPC bidding. Instead, it starts with automated bidding (maximize conversions), with limited control options such as setting target ROAS or excluding specific products or collections.

The lack of control has mixed implications: while it streamlines campaign management, it also restricts advertisers to Google’s automated decision-making, limiting strategic oversight.

For best results, we recommend initially building a solid sales history with traditional Shopping campaigns before transitioning to Performance Max. This ensures more predictable and efficient campaign performance when leveraging Google’s automation.

Conclusion

Since launching their ads in October 2021, our first month was data-mining, setup & restructuring and getting a good foundation in place before we tried to scale anything.

Once we had our core campaigns live, and went through our initial testing phase to weed out winning campaigns from those with a lower ROI, we were able to consolidate down the adspend and allocate more into the strongest campaign types.

Now, 14 months after working with this client we’ve managed to generate just shy of 5700 sales for a total of $1.22M in value at a 4.31 ROI from under $285K in ad spend. 

Always keep the 80/20 rule in mind. There’s literally thousands of things you can work on inside the ads manager, but ask yourself how much will it really move the needle? What impact will it have on your overall ROAS at the end of the month? Don’t get caught up optimizing for vanity metrics.

If you aren’t generating more revenue from your ads or generating the same amount with better margins, you should go back to the drawing board and peel back the layers to see what’s bottlenecking you. Is it traffic costs/CPC’s holding you back? Experiment with different bids, campaign types, bid strategies, placements, exclude unprofitable SKU’s, add more negative keywords, etc. to bring your costs down.

Is it the conversion rate on your traffic limiting you? Then tighten down on CRO on your website instead. Run A/B tests with different landing pages or sections in your landing page, analyze your Google Analytics page reports, Luckyorange heatmaps/recordings, and really find out why people are dropping off before purchasing.

If you keep the points discussed in this article in mind by following the data, applying the 80/20 rule and working smarter, not harder. You’ll be running some profitable Google Ads & scaling them up in no time!

And if by any chance you can’t do it yourself due to time constraints or you’d rather focus on something else in your business, then schedule a call with us! We have performance based guarantees and value based pricing models to make it a win-win relationship, and zero-risk effort to get started growing your business with us.