This case study describes how I ran PPC (Google, Bing & Meta Ads) for a golf store and helped them increase their net profit in 2 years by 600%.
Disclaimer: Because I’m sharing sensitive information no names will be mentioned. Most case studies are sh*t. They either don’t share numbers or say “revenue up by 277% in 30 days” with no context of before and after or sales trends over time. They conveniently highlight the stuff that looks good. My case studies are different. You can see both, the good and the bad, although lucky for me it’s mostly good.
Industry: Sports Gear / Golf Equipment
Platform: Shopify
Duration: March 2022 – Present (3+ years)
Services: Google Ads, Bing Ads, Paid Social/Meta Ads, SEO, Email Marketing, International Expansion.
Overview
| How long have we worked for? | 4+ years, since May 2022 – Present |
| Monthly Revenue | Up 23x from £50,000 to £1,150,000 |
| Monthly Net Profit | Up 11x from £10K to £110,000 |
| Average Profit Margin | 25% |
| AOV | £900 |
| Markets | International (UK 40%, Europe 30% USA 20%, Australia 10%) |
| Blended ROAS | 2,160% |
| Google Ads ROAS Total | 1,322% |
| TACOS (total ad spend / total revenue)
*includes all marketing spend |
9.5% |
| Google Ads ROAS Non-Brand | 1,101% |
| Monthly Google Ads Spend | £53,200 |
Happy Tuesday
A few years ago, on a cold Tuesday 8:49PM, February 15th, Bob reached out to me on Upwork, requesting for 5 minutes of my time to jump on a Zoom call at 8:50PM. That’s an ambitious entrepreneur, I thought. And there I was watching The Office on Netflix for the 7th time; hoping for a quiet evening, boredom leads people to do mad things, so I joined the call. It lasted 14 minutes, and the next day, I started managing the account. This case study is still a work in progress; it’s different from the other case studies because I decided to personally invest in the company in July 2023, so read on to find out how that worked out.
Account Audit
Lucky for me, the account had never been managed by a “good” expert/agency, it had no conversion tracking, and the product that spent the most was a £5 phone holder, which was just an accessory to one of their main products. The account had many opportunities.
I posted new campaigns and started scaling in March 2022. At the time, the website was doing £50K/month. The products are seasonal. Normally, demand picks up in September, with highs in November and starts to drop off around April/May.
The challenge
No senior manager has ever touched the account, it was all set up by the owner, who isn’t very tech-savvy, so the way he set it up 12 months ago with no conversion tracking, one campaign that was pushing a £5 product that was an accessory to the main product they were selling. It was a beautiful disaster, and it needed a total rebuild from scratch.
Approach/Strategy/How
Month 1
- Fixed tracking
- Built the campaigns for Shopping and Search, split into brand vs non-brand, prioritised products with the highest margins because the brand was selling a mix of their own products and other manufacturers.
Month 2
- Feed optimisations and improvements – all started with addressing titles. Most of them were very unorganised and were missing the keywords with solid search volume that represented them well.
Month 3
- Tested lead gen campaigns because they were selling a premium product, people would often want to speak with someone first, ask questions/get advice so we tested a landing page with Unbounce that we used for quite a while. Now 4 years later we’re still using a lead capture page that’s hosted on Shopify and we refined over the years based on various A/B tests to try and increase the conversion rate from click to lead to a booked call for an initial consultation.
Month 3+
- International expansion.
- Created another account for USA as demand was 10x in the US compared to the UK, judging by the search volume keyword planner was reporting on.
Nerdy stuff
What changes have I implemented, and how am I managing the account today?
1. Conversion Tracking & Profit Metrics
Fixed conversion tracking with the default Google & YouTube app and soon after that started tracking net profits with Profit Metrics which replaced the primary conversion actions for revenue. We had a mix of products with different margins, so it was important to feed that information to Google and “educate” smart bidding strategies on which products and keywords drive the most profit. Another benefit of Profit Metrics is that it manages to capture more conversions than the default conversions Google creates with its server-side tracking. For a 90-day period, this account saw a 21% uplift in conversions (from 362 recorded by Google to 438 registered in Profit Metrics) and a 12% increase in revenue (£387K Google vs £433K Profit Metrics). Not bad, the more data Google has, the better it will perform. It’s not about claiming more conversions for Google Ads as a channel in isolation, it’s about feeding conversion data to Google smart bidding strategies that will improve your bottom line.
2. Product Exclusions
Excluded unprofitable products from paid listings (Shopping & Display). This is so easy but often overlooked. Just an export with all-time spend and sales (ideally net profit hopefully your cost per item fields are not empty) in Shopify to identify potential exclusions works great for finding products to be scaled. By far the best way to manage your exclusions, relying just on Google Ads data may lead to assuming some products are performing better than you think because Google Ads does not account for returns by default.
I look at products that had at least 150 clicks or spent more than £100; anything less than that often leads to excluding products prematurely and you missing out on profits, especially if you have a high AOV (Average Order Value).
3. Advertising Worldwide
Initially, we started advertising in Europe. Set up a new campaign on low bids targeting the top EU markets from which we received the most traffic – Ireland, Switzerland, and Germany.
We simply set them up as additional target countries in the main Content API feed that, by default, was targeting only the UK. Eventually, we added all countries that are eligible to run Shopping Ads to take advantage of free listings and only advertised in those where we saw good conversion rates.
An easy win that lead to an increase in free clicks from an average of 10 to 250 a day!
Pro tip: Make sure your GTINs, Brand and MPN attributes have correct values, they’ll help boost your free traffic.
4. Search Campaigns
Built Search campaigns for the main products and categories. Initially maximising the impression share on exact match with phrase matches in the same ad groups on lower bids. And a few months in we run a test with driving traffic to the product page vs an Unbounce page collecting leads that would essentially be a guided product pitch, in the end, we implemented a solution where on the main website and all the product pages people had the option to book a call and get that additional support they needed to make the right choice for their needs. A tool that we used for it is Tolstoy. It runs a video on all pages that guides people to how we can help them and one of the options is booking a call.
Search campaigns are segmented into:
- Brand – our own brand name.
- Generic Top – keywords that are super-specific and over time have performed well for us.
- Generic Catchall – keywords that are relevant, but we don’t want to be very aggressive with, running on either low bids or higher ROAS targets.
5. Bing Ads
Set up Bing ads with a simplified structure on manual bids, mainly due to a lower demand compared to Google so no need for that much segmentation. Bing works really well, especially if your audience is not very tech-savvy, and no offense, but golfers are not very tech-savvy 🙈 although things are changing with AI. The volume is not massive, but we’re getting consistent sales and good brand awareness, hitting 70%+ Impression Share for a relatively low spend of £500 to £1,000/month.
6. GMC (Google Merchant Center) Set-Up & Product Feed Optimisations
The quality of your feed will determine how well you shopping campaigns will perform. In this account, the product feed had many incorrect attributes, missing GTINs, wrong brand values (rather than using the manufacturer they had the vendor value in Shopify set as their own brand name), generic or missing product types which help with better keyword matching.
And often overlooked – the GMC account which has a few hidden things that you shouldn’t ignore:
- Shipping & Returns – often highlighted in the shopping listings, if you’re missing reviews & promotions. Pro tip: If your shipping estimates are wrong provide Google with historical order tracking data. Or you can use Simprosys which has an integration with Google to pull the last 60 days’ orders and provide more accurate shipping estimates.
- Add a checkout link to your free listings. Google claims “this can help increase conversions and sales.”. I’ve not observed a major difference in free listings sales, but it’s very easy to set up and you should do it.
- Set up branding settings. Upload your logo assets and set up colours that will be used in Display Ads.
- Set up free listings.
- Enable automatic updates – you’d want to have these enabled most often; it helps prevent some disapprovals.
- Enable Dynamic Remarketing so many times I see this disabled.
- Enable Promotions and make sure to keep them up to date with offers you’re running on the site.
- Enable Product Ratings – very very important, whether you’re selling other brands or your own products, have measures in place to collect reviews, and over time, the more reviews you get, Google will reward you with better positions and results, the listings will look more trustworthy and stand out. A good tool third party tool that integrates well with Shopify is Judge.me.
7. PMax Build
Built multiple asset groups in the same PMax campaign. Some target a single product, others split by category.
8. Increased CTR from 1% to 1.3% leading to a 28% uplift in conversions
Changed from advertising all variants first variants only. Some products had multiple sizes, and because these weren’t clothes, it wasn’t worth keeping them all in. It created a lot of clutter and more expensive variants that weren’t as attractive as the cheaper ones. After a careful review of the search terms, people weren’t looking for size options so we decided to trial first variants only and haven’t looked back.
9. Other Channels
It’s not just about Google Ads. It’s important to have a healthy balance between channels. Organic, Social, Email, Referrals and others.
Email – Around July 2023, we started setting up flows in Klaviyo and next month saw a 30% increase in revenue. Since then, we get around £100K+ in attributed revenue every month, not all is incremental revenue, some of these sales would’ve happened anyway, but the numbers are healthy and help build a stronger bond between the brand and the customers.
Social – consistency and authentic content are key to building a following. Over the years our main channel has been Instagram with 25K followers.
Organic – Better organic rankings have considerably improved the performance of our paid search campaigns. Shopify is known to create a lot of duplicate pages so with a mix of some technical fixes and on-page SEO best practices we managed to rank the website in the top 5 for our core products and categories.
10. Bidding Strategy Experiments
Due to the nature of the products we sell, high-value items, sometimes worth £10K and more, smart bidding strategies at times charge too much for a click and through experiments, we, found that mCPC (manual cost per click) works better with exact and phrase match terms, not broads unfortunately, they were generating a lot of waste and regular negative additions didn’t help improve the quality of the traffic much.
Results
There have been a few setbacks, mainly supply issues causing disruption and preventing us from scaling at full speed during certain months, but overall, the account has done well and maintained healthy profits. Here’s an overview of total revenue vs spend:
Monthly Overall Revenue: £51K (March 2022) > £136K (March 2023) in 12 months > £334K (March 2024) after 2 years.
Monthly Net Profit After Ad Spend: £10K (March 2022) > £24K (March 2023) in 12 months > £65K (March 2024) after 2 years.
Investing in the business
After 16 months of working together, Bob (the founder of the company) suggested I buy some shares, so I did, that was July 2023. We used the funds to buy stock and launch in the US. As soon as that happened, I started to get more involved in marketing operations, and the results speak for themselves. Even though it was off-season, we had a great start, beating sales highs +100% up YoY.
No founder likes to spend money, and Bob is not an exception, he didn’t have time to do marketing, and I saw an opportunity to scale. I was so confident that I was ready to put my money on the line. And when he saw that I actually meant what I said and put my money where my mouth is, he listened more and didn’t micromanage as much as he used to when we just had a client to “one-man-agency” relationship.
Now, I have to be honest and give credit to the team at the company, without them, none of this would’ve been possible. Marketing likes to take credit when things are good and blame other factors like weather or demand when it’s quiet or things don’t work out so do I sometimes, but not here. The business would’ve done well anyway, I happened to be in the right place at the right time to offer a helping hand and propel its growth.
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So there you have it. If you’ve read this far, you’re awesome, thank you!
If you have any questions or thoughts to share, I’d love to hear from you, just send an email to victor@victorserban.com
Cheers