PPC For DIY & Hardware Products – Building & Construction Store Doubled Profit in 3 months with Google Ads
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
Golf Brand PPC Case Study – Increased Net Profit From £10K to £65K/Month In 2 Years With Google Ads
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
Automotive PPC – Car Parts Store From £500K to £1M in 12 months With Google Ads
Client: Automotive eCommerce – Car Parts, OEM & Aftermarket Spares. Services provided: Google Ads Management This is a detailed case study on how to run PPC for auto parts products. Overview A global car parts supplier in business since 1995, had struggled to scale its Google Ads campaigns. Before working together, multiple agencies managed the account with little success in driving incremental revenue. On the surface ad accounts seemed like they were performing really well, but it was mostly down to the brand traffic in Google Ads and retargeting campaigns on Facebook, which were driving little to no incremental revenue. Things needed to change. After a call with Tom (Head Of Marketing) talking about growth goals and account history, we agreed to follow up with a short video audit and a formal proposal for the monthly management of the Google Ads campaigns. Two days later, I delivered the audit, highlighting quick wins and a few critical issues that easily convinced Tom I was the right man for the job. Audit Summary The account was overreporting conversions. It had two primary conversion actions, one from Analytics and the other from Google Ads. A rookie mistake that often goes unnoticed. Messy account structure. The brand keywords were mixed with generic campaigns on similar targets, leading Google to overbid for branded terms. Wasted spend on underperforming products. Every account with history will have an average CVR (Conversion rate) and ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). For this example, let’s assume your profit margins are flat across the board. By knowing your average CVR and ROAS, you can work out what % of products are underperforming (say your average CVR is 2%, and breakeven ROAS is 400%, so you look at the last 90 days (depending on the account size) at products that had more than 100 clicks, a conversion rate lower than 2% and a ROAS of less than 400% these will be your underperformers) and take action by Reviewing product attributes like titles, price and image (These three attributes are the most important and likely to affect the bottom line) Reviewing the landing page (any obvious issues like poor reviews or unoptimised listing with not much information on the page) Moving them to a different campaign on lower bids or higher ROAS targets if you’re using smart bidding strategies. Excluding them from Shopping listings altogether. Sometimes, less is more and better. Don’t be afraid to remove stuff, which is what we did, especially if you’re a retailer. High-margin products & categories were not getting the attention they deserved due to a high number of products in a single campaign. Over 80% of products had no clicks in the last 30 days, and the top spend categories seemed to be low-value products. Changes Fixed duplicate conversions and set realistic targets focusing on MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio) growth rather than platform the ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) reported in the ad account. Better budget planning. A comprehensive Google Analytics audit with high-level channel analysis concluded that some channels were spending too much, in particular Facebook because it claimed a lot of conversions through retargeting that we assumed would’ve converted anyway, we halved the spend and used that money on Google as a result we doubled the overall revenue. Fixed GMC (Google Merchant Center) disapprovals on a ~40,000 product feed. The rate of disapproved items decreased from 20% to 1%. Restructured the account to accommodate better visibility on high-margin products. Created new native feeds for new countries – Germany, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Italy, France, United States, Australia Introduced profit metrics in January 2024, which allowed us to start reporting net profits in the account and optimise for high-margin products that drove the most profit. Split brand and generic campaigns to have better spend control on the brand, an analysis of Auction Insights revealed that there was barely any competition and there hasn’t been a need to spend as much on branded keywords, we accepted a 60% IS (Impression Share) and instead we used the budget in the generic campaign. Excluded brand from PMax which initially shocked the system, but eventually helped us scale Performance Max campaigns better. Set up a supplemental feed for product exclusions to update with high spend and underperforming products. Results It took us a some time and effort to see positive results, and it’s paid off by investing more in generic campaigns, cutting back on brand spend and shifting the budget from underperforming channels like Facebook to Google. That’s it, if you have any questions, send them to victor@victorserban.com Cheers, Victor PS If you click on my affiliate links, I may earn a tiny commission at no extra cost to you, which helps support my work and earns treats for Paco (my cat), and most of the time, you’ll get an offer, too. Win-win! I only promote products I believe in and personally use.
Calls vs Forms – Instead of Booking a Call, Fill in a Form
I value time. Yours and mine. So instead of calls, what if you filled in a form, not a generic form asking for your name, email and phone number, but a form with proper questions? I love questions. Good questions lead to better ideas, insights and conversations. So, instead of booking a call, try a form with a few questions. Each of those questions will help me understand whether I’m the right person to help you. 1. What’s your name? We’ve got to start somewhere :) 2. How can I help you? What’s the one problem you’re struggling with right now? What is your main Google Ads challenge? Three different ways to ask the same question, pick whichever resonates most with you at this moment in time. 3. Why does the business exist – who do you serve? What does the business do for these people? Yes, you want to make more money (me too), and you will if you have a genuine interest in helping people by doing something better than most. More profit is the result of that, not a reason to exist. For example, I want to work with people that I vibe well with, who are honest and care about their online reputation, stores that sell a premium product where lower price doesn’t have to be the only reason why people would buy from you. Ideally, DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands that run on Shopify. 4. Why should people choose your business over a competitor? With so many options available, why should people listen to you? For example, I work exclusively with e-commerce brands and have a framework I follow which is tailored to online stores, from the campaign structures to daily, weekly and monthly optimisations to high-converting product pages. Think of myself as an extension of your current team, your trusted source of no BS marketing advice; although my focus is PPC (pay-per-click), specifically paid search, I’m not too bad with other marketing stuff either. Most PPC agencies and freelancers offer everything under the sun, so you should work with me if you’re tired of generic strategies and want a no-nonsense approach that delivers results and more profit. 5. Who are your top 3 competitors? And how do you compare? We all have competitors; don’t worry. The world is big enough for everyone to get a piece of the pie. I like competition; they challenge me to do better. So, who are you up against? I’ll list three competitors of mine. They’re not direct competitors and are rather larger in size, but I respect their work and, in some ways, look up to them. If you decided to work with them instead of me, great; I’d be happy to recommend them, so if you have a chat with me and feel that we don’t vibe, please reach out to them, they all do good work. Zato Marketing WebSavvy Solutions 8 Worth mentioning Ed Leake and his agency Midas Media, but he doesn’t take on new clients. He’s also the guy who put together the best PPC checklist there is, so if you’re a marketing specialist or a business owner looking to DIY your PPC setup, check it out here You may also find this Linkedin post useful where I list five and a half people who know and do Google Ads better than me 6. What’s your website URL? Straightforward here. 7. Monthly Revenue (last 12 months average) What’s your total across all channels? 8. How much additional revenue do you want each month? What’s the magic number? 9. What are your profit margins? It will help me put together a forecast; if it varies, use an average. 10. What is your AOV (Average Order Value)? I hope it’s not £10. 11. Finally, what’s your email? Where do you want me to send the promised PPC forecast? What next? I’ll follow up with a personalised PPC proposal with a 6-month forecast. It’s the best forecast template on the planet. Self-declared. If you’d rather send an email, that works too: victor@victorserban.com See you later :) PS Here’s an embed, just in case.
Google Ads Onboarding – What to expect?
You signed the contract, or just wondering what to expect as soon as you sign up. I’ll detail in this post what the onboarding looks like so you know what happens in the first month of the Google Ads management service. Before you even consider onboarding, you need to pass the vibe check, aka “on a scale of 1 to 10 how delusional are you?” or what normal people would call expectations assessment. 1. You Join Trello It’s just a fancy to do list and you don’t have to learn to use it if you don’t want to, it’s mainly for me, to keep me accountable because I am human and I sometimes forget things. It’s also a place for me to dump all the ideas I have for you. It’s broken down into weeks. Here’s an overview of the first 4 weeks. Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 That’s it :) Any questions, email victor@victorserban.com See you later