This is a case study detailing how I ran PPC ads for a DIY & hardware brand selling building & construction supplies with Google Ads.
Good neighbours live in Holmes Chapel
This case study is a referral from another client of mine, read their case study here, they literally have their warehouses next to each other. We’ve been working together since January and in a relatively short amount of time managed to double monthly net profits from £11K to £22.5K+ and I’m excited to share how we’ve done and what we’re doing now as we continue to scale.
First Meet
I first met with Rob (the founder) at their HQ in Crewe. We talked about how it all started and their current marketing operations. They had a healthy split of channels and marketplaces that were performing but haven’t seen much growth, being a little too cautious with investing more in ads as they lost confidence in marketing after they partnered with an agency that didn’t live up to expectations. They shall remain nameless, but it’s worth mentioning they’re one of the largest digital marketing agencies in the UK that work primarily with small businesses, and they’re rated Excellent on Trustpilot with over 2,000 reviews; the funny bit is that this is not the first time others have reached out to me with pretty much the same story, well not everything is birds & bees & flowers, anyway.
For the last year, Rob has been managing the account himself and he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. The first question he asked me when we looked at the account was, “What’s our return on investment from Google Ads in the last year?”. Every other month, he would log in and adjust the budgets depending on how busy or slow sales were without much analysis of what the campaigns were reporting.
A big chunk of sales were from Amazon and eBay, which charge high commissions and the fact that most of the items had low margins (20-30%), the focus was on scaling Shopify.
It was clear that the account needed more attention, had the capacity to do better, and paid search was the right channel to help them generate more profit, so I agreed to follow up with a quick account audit and a formal proposal.
Audit
While auditing the account, I encountered a few issues and highlighted opportunities outside paid search that I knew would make a positive difference.
1. Duplicate conversion tracking
Double counting conversions from Google Analytics and Google Ads tags, you’d think an agency of that size would know better, but here we are again.
2. Underperforming campaigns
Five PMax campaigns split into brands, at first, didn’t seem too bad, but neither of those was prioritising their best sellers and high-margin products. Along with a local search campaign targeting generic terms like “builders merchants near me” that has generated three transactions worth £128 for £2,950 in ad spend, and they’re not getting many click-and-collect orders, so that budget would’ve been better spent on other campaigns, to drive more online sales.
3. Email marketing
Other than sending an email asking for a review after an order and the automated abandoned checkout emails by Shopify, they didn’t have any other flows. So I suggested signing up for Klaviyo and setting up a few more email flows and a popup with a discount for orders over £100 to increase the AOV (average order value), which was low ~£50.
4. Profit tracking
With over 1,900 products and 8,000+ variants in the feed that range from 16% to 65% in gross margins, it was crucial to have a profit tracking solution in Google Ads to inform the smart bidding strategies of which products have scope to be scaled and which should have budget and bid caps.
First, I noticed some products missing cost prices in Shopify, which needed updating. While that was being done, I set up Profit Metrics — the best out-of-the-box solution that is super easy and straightforward to link with a Shopify store. It won’t be long until you’ll start seeing better results and, most importantly, better net profits! Here’s a view of the last 90 days for this account.
5. SEO wins
The majority of the category pages had “lazy” titles and no descriptions to help them rank on Google. I suggested a few simple tweaks to help those pages rank better and strengthen the organic profile of the website, which in turn would help boost paid search conversion rates. For example, they had a collection page selling Corrapol sheets with the title “Corrapol – {Brand Name}”, unlikely that’s ever going to rank, so I suggested having a combination of a longer tail keyword that has a transactional intent “Corrapol Corrugated Roofing Sheets For Sale – {Brand Name}” along with changing the H1 to “Corrapol Roofing Sheets” and adding a description. Today, with ChatGPT, it’s never been easier to produce SEO copy. It’s not the best, and with a little more effort, you can develop a better prompt, but it’s better than nothing and gives you a great starting point.
6. CRO & website improvements
CRO stands for conversion rate optimisation. As PPC experts, we should look at the full funnel, not just what’s inside Google Ads. We must check on competitors and always look for ways to improve the conversion rate on the website. Most times, it’s the landing page that needs more attention and not the campaign in Google Ads. After a brief analysis of what else is out there, I noticed some things that I was sure would improve the conversion rate. Here are a few:
- Add a price match guarantee banner on the product pages
- Add reviews to the product pages – I suggested they use Judge.me which had an import feature so they could upload all the reviews from Trustpilot, Amazon and Ebay
- Free Next-Day Delivery timer – they were one of the few retailers who held stock and were offering next-day shipping, but didn’t take advantage of it with a timer which would do well if you had “Order within the next 3 hours to get it tomorrow”
- Highlight USPs in a section under menu with next day delivery, price match and thousands of 5 star reviews.
7. Product feed
When you are a retailer, and 85% of the products in your feed are missing a GTIN value, you’re missing out big time. It’s one of the most important attributes to use, and it increases your chances of getting product reviews and better search query matching.
The product ratings programme wasn’t enabled, which made listings less competitive in the auctions.
And a handful of disapprovals that simply needed a few tweaks and some manual reviews.
By improving the feed quality, we are consistently getting 25 free clicks a day and more, up from an average of only 5 a day.
8. Google My Business
Their listing was outdated, with no photos, and they were missing products, categories, updates, and social profiles. Fixing these generally boosts your local rankings, overall organic profile, and trust with Google.
9. Bing Ads
With no prior history on Bing, we were missing out on good traffic. It didn’t take long to see an increase in sales (we started the campaigns at the end of January). From an average of 8 orders a day, we’re up to 60, and that’s just the orders Shopify analytics has attributed to Bing.
Proposal
Along with sending the above to Rob, I was confident I could help them improve so I suggested a fixed fee + commission from net profit growth. Their average net profit for the last 12 months was around £10K, so we agreed on commissions on anything over £10K net profit. And I’m happy to report that in the first month after I took over the account, we reached an all-time high and are continuing to scale.
First changes
The first change was to implement Profit Metrics and replace revenue tracking with profit. Not long ago after the change Google started prioritising higher margin products which is exactly what we wanted.
I’ve set up a Search campaign for historical best sellers using Shopify data.
Instead of a generic PMax ad copy, I’ve set up a feed-only asset and moved the asset to a separate PMax. Otherwise Google likes to drive lots of cheap traffic from display and I wanted to take better control over Shopping listings.