As a Google Ads Agency, we are asked by some of our clients a number of questions pertaining to Google Ads and how these can help them increase revenues. To help them and you understand what impact ads have on your ecommerce store, here is a case study you can read and learn from.

Some people have this mistaken belief that once they create an online store, it will be an easy avenue for them to make money. While online revenues and opportunities did increase in the past year due to the pandemic, it actually isn’t as easy as it is made out to be. This is because of the increase in the number of people doing the same thing. This is why sellers have to come up with ways to get ahead of the competition. This is where online ads come in.

There are many ways to advertise your goods online. There are Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, and Google Ads. If you’re thinking of doing well on Google, then you’re best option would be to focus most of your efforts on Google Ads. You can try to do all these yourself or you can ask a Google Ads Agency for help.

If you’re thinking of advertising on Google, you will first want to think about where exactly on Google you will advertise. One of the options that you have, and the one which will be focusing on in this article, is Google Shopping.

To show you what we mean about doing well on Google Shopping ads and getting the best results from it, we will show you what we did for one of our clients. In this piece, you will find information on what we did and how it impacted the sales as well as popularity of the site that we handled.

Client: Personalized Gift Site

Industry: Gift and Specialty

Campaign Type: Optimization and Pay-Per-Click Ads on Google Shopping

Project Background

The client in this case study is an online store that specializes in gifts and unique items that people buy for their loved ones.  As their chosen Google Ads Agency, we began handling this client in the middle of 2020, right at the height of the lockdowns due to the pandemic. The company called for help in increasing traffic and revenues to their site.

Project Objective

As mentioned above, the main objective of this project is to increase traffic and revenues to the site. This would include improving on any efforts that the company may have already done on their own in terms of ads and other avenues. Apart from this, we would also need to not only help increase traffic and revenues but also tweak the site to appear relevant to Google.

This means that apart from the creation of ads, we had to recommend tweaks for optimization purposes, which can help our ads become more relevant in the eyes of search engines. This is why we included in the project objectives the optimization of the site to help it appear better on search engines. When this happens, you get to appear to prospective buyers twice – on ads that appear on the same page as organic results. This helps legitimize your products and store. When the site appears twice on the same page for the same keyword, albeit in different forms, it cements the site’s reputation as a good place for people to buy what they are looking for.  

Project Challenges

As a Google Ads Agency, we faced multiple challenges with this project, primarily because of the niche and the timing of the need. The biggest challenge we faced was in getting people to notice us during such a difficult time. While life still had to go on despite the pandemic, buying gifts and specialized items during this time wasn’t the main focus of people everywhere. Since people were unsure of the future due to the health problem that took the world by surprise, gift-buying was obviously the last thing on their minds.

Before we can begin work on the site, we had to investigate whether or not they had any work done for them by other agencies in terms of Google ads and advertising on any other platform. Aside from determining the ad history and background of the company, we also had to check if the site was optimized for organic search as well as to analyze what would work well for them.

Analysis showed that they relied too much on organic traffic for revenues and even with an increase in online spending by many, they weren’t actually getting their fair share of the pie, so to speak. Our biggest challenge was to not only optimize the site to make them appear more above their competition but to actually put them in a situation where actual buyers found them. We decided on a multi-pronged solution to help them achieve the kind of income stream they wanted while at the same time, giving them the kind of online exposure that can build a stellar reputation.

The Solutions

Our first attack was to optimize the site so it appeared relevant to search terms that people used to find them. This involved quite a bit of work and it all began with keyword research, demographic research, and partitioning. The partitioning was to help us determine what strategies to use for the site and to create different buckets of keywords for each strategy.

To help you understand what was done to help the site achieve the revenues that it deserved, we’ll break this strategy down to its bare bones.

Optimization

The first thing we did was to optimize the site with relevant keywords that would help it rank better on search engine results pages or SERPs. This began with keyword research, which we first did for site optimization. The keywords that we gained from this work were expanded to include not only general terms but also specific terms that we could use with category and product-specific ads. We will cover more of that in the next stages of this strategy.

We found lots of keywords that were relevant to the niche itself. This included general terms like personalized gift ideas, and more specific terms, like music plaques and watches for men. We chose the terms that weren’t only relevant to the niche but also had quite a substantial search volume. The keywords we used to optimize the site were the same keywords we placed in another bucket for use in the creation of ads, but these we just set aside for now.

To optimize, we sprinkled some of the general keywords all over the site in relevant content that included blogs, product descriptions, and even in alt-text. Also part of the optimization stage was the addition of long-tail keywords that had lots of search volume and that we knew would drive targeted traffic to the site. Examples of these include keywords like hand-crafted leather wallet, hand-crafted watch, and necklace to my future wife, to mention only a few.

The results of our effort weren’t too bad. We showed up on the first page of Google organic search in the top 10. This meant that we are getting the results we were aiming for with organic. Now, it was time to move on to Google Ads.

Google Ads

­­Another avenue that we took to help increase traffic and revenues here is the creation of Google Ads for the site, which is one of our strengths as a Google Ads Agency. This began with, as always, keyword research, which gave us not only terms relevant to the niche but also search volume and competition. These are important to the creation of ads since these last two will dictate the bidding strategy that you will use.

Since we wanted the products of our client to show not only on SERPs and as ads on these same pages but also as ads for Google Shopping, we had to optimize these to appear in a format that was acceptable to the platforms we were targeting. This is where the use of Google Merchant Center came in.

In the creation of ads, we had to use the usual split-testing model to find out what ads appealed to our target demographics. The ads that showed more traffic and more revenues were the ones we kept running and the non-performing ones were either scrapped or repurposed to appeal to a different demographic. We also chose which ads we deemed would work better on search and which ones worked better on Google Shopping.

Tweaking and Refining

The final prong of this strategy came in the form of reworking and fixing of current campaigns as well as ads that showed some promise but did not deliver. We also took pains to check our statistics daily and to fix things as we see fit when we noticed relevant changes in our reports. Included in what we did regularly were the exclusion of irrelevant queries and terms that we felt weren’t in-line with what we wanted to achieve.

This last part is an ongoing process that continues to this day. We constantly tweak our ads and research keywords on a regular basis to find out what other new terms we can use to create new ads with as well as to update existing ones with. This keyword research is also done to help with the removal of ads that were no longer working for us, based on the keywords that were used and the products that were no longer trending.

Our Results

So, what is the key takeaway in all of this? For starters, as a Google Ads Agency, we found that saw that our efforts helped them a lot. The company actually earned more than they did pre-pandemic and this is for items that aren’t necessarily considered essential. The site also got the kind of attention that it wanted and the kind of revenues that they needed to keep them going.

All of these were achieved primarily because of the work that was done for them via the process outlined above. The marked increase in revenues were seen in a matter of 6 months, gradually increasing in the first three months and exponentially in the following months up to today. In one of our reports, we could easily see along with our clients that sales and traffic were indeed on an uptick, with a 100% increase in clicks and an increase in ROAS of 340% in a span of 6 months. If that isn’t a testament of success, then we don’t know what is.

Also worth noting is that, even though we did have a number of carts abandoned before checkout, it paled in comparison with the number of successful transactions that the site experienced. We also noticed the marked increase in clicks and revenues starting from the third month of working on the site up to today. An increase in sales from hundreds of products in a month to thousands the following month is not something to scoff at.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can safely say that the combination of ads on Google’s SERPs and on Google Shopping is a must, if you are in the e-commerce sphere. No amount of telling us otherwise will convince us that there is no need for one or the other. We have the results to show for it and, more importantly, our clients have seen exactly what our work can do for them and their site.

If you want to experience the same success for your site and get the same kind of revenues our clients did, you will want to try this strategy out. This formula is geared towards e-commerce sites, so if you’re not a shopping site or are one that doesn’t sell products but rather services, then you will need another type of strategy. You should know, however, that no matter what your niche or what business you’re in, the fundamentals still apply.

These include the most important first step, which is keyword research, and a careful analysis of your site. Before any work can be done, a thorough audit of your site is required. This will help us, or whoever you ask to help with your site’s performance, find the flaws in it and recommend changes before any ad work is started. The audit will also help us see if any optimization was attempted on your site and to fix any errors that resulted from such prior activities.

If you want to find out more about what we can do as a Google Ad Agency, for you and your website, don’t hesitate to contact us. We can show you some of the results that we’ve come up with via our analytics pages and other similar proof of success in what we do.

 

Note: Our case studies don’t come with the usual screenshots of our analytics and ad backend pages due to existing NDAs with the clients being mentioned in them.