In just one quarter we were able to increase revenue by 99%.  At the same time we raised AOV by 5% and conversion rate by 22%.

So how did we help this men’s brand grow?

We addressed the Google Ads Account:

• Shopping Campaigns were revamped and restructured.
• New core search campaigns added
• Keyword mining campaigns added
• ROAS targets adjusted
• Continued experiments, testing, and improvements

But before we get into it here’s what happened after month one of our take-over. Well on our way to producing 100K in additional revenue.

Now on to how we got such great results.

How to Structure Shopping campaigns (now Pmax)

When we inherited the account, all products were targeted in one shopping campaign.
There are two big issues with this setup.

First, your products are all different.
At the very least the categories of products are all different. That means the descriptions and copy needed for your shopping ads will vary. Boilerplate, generic, and frankly the lazy way of lumping everything together produces poor results over the long term.

There are some instances where it makes sense to put all products together.
However, with over 300 SKUs and previous results from the account, this wasn’t such a situation.

Second, your products’ margins are likely different.

A 1.5 ROAS (though we should evaluate ads based on 60/90 day LTV/costs) could be great for the cologne you produce but terrible for an after-shave you produce.

ROAS is a self-contained metric.  It doesn’t take into account product costs. And while it can be a guiding metric, it needs to be taken in context.

Brake products out into the appropriate categories based on category and ROAS.

As a result of proper segmentation, we could pick the appropriate ROAS per product category.
Note: selecting a ROAS that is too high will limit your number of sales and revenue.  By getting the balance right, we maximized ROAS with total revenue.

How to setup search campaigns

The search campaigns that were in the account were also misconfigured.

We commonly see these top 5 mistakes (which were all present in this account):

1. Creating a Structure that Breeds Irrelevance or Inhibits Scale
2. Choosing Keywords That Aren’t Aligned with Your Goals
3. Poor relevance scores for landing pages
4. Not Taking Advantage of All of the Applicable Ad Extensions

Set up your campaign structures

We came in and created product-specific search campaigns and DSAs. Each search campaign had multiple variations.  Exact, specific, and broad.

Exact campaigns will drive most of your conversions.  Phrase captures more traffic and can be used for some keyword mining. And Broad should only be used at low level spend for Keyword mining.

Choose the right keywords

You need to pick keywords that are very bottom of funnel that have purchase intent. You might struggle if you go too long tail because there may not be enough volume.

If that happens, you’ll have to shorten your keywords so that your ads will run but will still be conversion-focused.

Only later should you expand to keywords that are further up the funnel.

As you add more keywords and build campaigns, you MUST add in negative keywords to make sure your keywords aren’t triggering irrelevant searches and wasting $$$.

Check Landing Page Score And Relevancy

One of the most time-consuming, resource-intensive tasks is optimizing landing pages, including product pages if you’re sending traffic there, to work well with your ads.

This part of the work is critical and can separate you from the pack precisely because it takes a lot of work to do.

As relevancy goes up, CPCs go down, and ROAS goes up.

Most overlook this aspect.
You shouldn’t.

How do you get better relevancy scores?

There are four primary ways.  But ultimately it’s about better matching the keyword to the text of your ad and to the text of your landing page.  We’re using “landing page” liberally here. It could be a product page, category page, blog post etc…

1. Improve your product page copy
2. Include copy on your category pages
3. Send traffic to an optimized blog post
4. Create a dedicated landing page for traffic.

No matter what strategy you use, the concept is fairly simple. The execution on the other hand is a bit harder.  You need to balance satisfying google vs. making a compelling sales argument.

Incidentally, the higher the conversion rate of a page to the google stated goal (typically purchase) also leads to lower CPCs.

Improve your page copy to improve ad relevancy
To improve the relevancy in your copy you want to include keywords in your H1, and other headlines along with more relevant copy that includes other suggest keywords from your google ads.

Go to your ad and note all the suggested headline keywords.

Include all those keywords in your landing page.

Because you need to include different variations of keywords a conversion-focused blog post is often easier to get higher relevancy scores with instead of a product page or category page.

That said, blog posts aren’t always optimized for conversion. Though they should be (separate topic).

In the end you’ll want to test various types of landing pages to maximize relevancy, CPCs, and conversion rate.

The easiest place to start is with product pages.
DON’T send traffic to your home page (there are very few exceptions)

How do you check your landing page scores?

It will take some time for your landing page quality scores to populate.

Go to:
Keywords → search keywords → columns → modify columns → landing page experience

You’re shooting for average at minimum. Ideally, you’ll have above-average landing page experience scores for all pages.

Take advantage of all extensions

Extensions are often overlooked, to the advertiser’s detriment. Extensions offer you another chance to add value props, sales info and more to help add context to your ad. These opportunities can mean the difference between making the sale or not.

As you can see, Nike makes use of extensions fairly extensively. What you don’t see here are price extensions. Make use of price extensions.

The more extensions you use, the better. They take up space on the page and push your competitors’ ads, and site links further down the page. And make it more likely a customer will click on some part of your ad.

Add keyword Mining Campaigns

As you progress, you’ll want to expand your keyword list and test new Kws. To do this, you need to set up what we call “keyword mining campaigns.”

These are campaigns set up for the express purpose of discovering what terms customers are using to trigger ads that end up in high CTRs and conversions.

These are low-budget campaigns.
Either DSAs or Broad Match campaigns.

Typically low spend at $10 or $20 per day is more than enough.

Once you discover a new keyword.  Move it from the broad campaign into your phrase and exact campaigns.

Adjust your ROAS targets to maximize revenue with profit.

As a rule of thumb, the higher the ROAS target the fewer overall conversions you get. It’s not a perfect inverse, but it is still a rule.  If Google is trying to get you sales at a particular ROAS, it eliminates possible conversions by not serving your ad if the algo thinks it can’t meet your ROAS target.

The lower your ROAS the more possible conversions and the more revenue.

Your job is to find the balance between ROAS and revenue while maintaining the necessary levels of profitability.

There are 2 primary ways to determine your required ROAS.

1. 1 / Profit Margin % = Breakeven ROAS
2. Or you include your 60/90 day LTV in the calculation.

Just using profit margin is a bit simplistic. This assumes that you need to be profitable on the first sale.

But that’s not always realistic and can even inhibit company growth. Of course, you can’t wait years to recoup spend but if you can wait 60/90 days, you’ll have far more growth potential than a business that insists on a positive ROAS immediately.

Continued experiments, testing, and improvements

To maximize your results, there are five primary levers you’ll want to pull.

1. Increase landing page conversions
2. Increase AD CTRs and Conversion rates.
3. Increase 60/90 day LTV
4. Add more keywords and negative keywords
5. Run campaign experiments.

Addressing the step-by-step specifics of most of these levers goes way beyond the scope of this article. But we’re not going to leave you high and dry so let’s get to it.

Increase your landing page conversions

Increasing your conversion rate is the largest lever you can pull. Just a 0.5% increase in CVR can mean the difference between your ads losing money or being very profitable.

The best way to do this is to run split tests. To start free use Google Optimize.
There’s just a bit of setup but it’s pretty straightforward.

For your initial test of a page, take a big swing.
Test vastly different concepts or “big ideas”.

Once you find a winner assuming you’re happy with the conversion rate, then you can start testing different elements on page for more incremental results.

Typically we set up a “redirect” campaign since it lets us test completely different layouts and concepts.

Once you have a control and variant designed, it’s time to run your test.
You must have enough traffic going to the page so that your test will produce statistically significant results within a reasonable period.

Since you’re looking to run ads, this usually isn’t a problem.

There are three primary conversions that you’re looking for.  And don’t worry Google Optimize will help you determine a statistically significant winner.

1. Transactions
2. Revenue
3. Subscriptions (this is for continuity programs ie. subscribe and save)

It’s up to you to determine which metric is most important. You can track all three but must pick a primary metric.

It doesn’t really matter which you pick as primary since you can look at all three metrics and pick your winner once the test is done according to Google Optimize.

By default, you can pick transactions and revenue. It takes a special setup to measure and break out subscription revenue.

Increase AD CTRs and Conversion rates.

This comes down to testing different ads.  You always want at least two ads per adset so that you have a winner and a loser once each has gotten enough impressions.

All things equal you want to evaluate two key metrics to determine a winning or losing ad.

1. Click Through Rate (CTR)
2. Conversion Rate (CVR)

Generally, the measure of an ad’s success is CTR.  And the gut check is CVR.

If clickthrough rate is high that means you’ve written a compelling ad.
And you’ll normally see a commensurately lower CPC as your CTR goes up.

All things equal if conversion rate varies greatly (outside of one or two standard deviations) then you’ll need to assess if what you’ve written or promised in the ad doesn’t match or isn’t fulfilled by the landing page you’re sending traffic to.

Increase 60/90 day LTV

Again, a complicated subject.  But it really comes down to getting someone to make an additional purchase within 60 to 90 days of their initial purchase.

There are three primary strategies here:

1. Get customers on continuity programs asap
2. Follow up by Email and SMS with per-product messaging within your 90-day window
3. Target purchasers with specific ads within the first 90 days.

We can try a combination of tactics. And sometimes none of these work and we need to go to a backup plan.

Add more keywords and negative keywords

You need to ever expand the universe of keywords you try and at the same time the keywords that need to be excluded. You’ll find winners that you keep and reduce waste by adding negative keywords.

New keywords will be a combination of those you identify in your broad and Dynamic campaigns.

You’ll add search terms to your phrase and exact campaigns that have led to conversions or are promising based on CTR.

You’ll need to continue evaluating those keywords once they hit at least 1000 impressions to see if trends emerge. Either they’ll be worth keeping or you’ll want to exclude them because they don’t convert.

Run campaign experiments.

Google ads lets you run experiments without affecting your current campaigns’ performance.

What should you test?

• Bid Strategies – this includes testing manual CPC vs. automatic bid strategies such as maximize conversions or maximize conversion value.
• Geographic Targeting – test different geographic locations to see how they react to your ads. You can then exclude locations or bid more if certain locations convert better.
• Ad Copy – test various ad copy and different  CTAs to see CTR and CVRs are affected.
• Keyword Bids –  You should test bidding more or less on each keyword bid.  It’s possible you can still keep impression share with lower bids or conversely capture more impression share with a higher bid and so get more conversions.

What about Facebook? We profitably scaled with an average ROAS of 4.22 and drove 5,797 sales in the first half of the year.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the client’s facebook ads account:

How were we able to drive so many profitable conversions?

• Starting with strong offers
• Campaign structures
• Audiences
• Creative & Copy & Offer Testing

You must come up with compelling offers and big ideas (that does NOT mean you have to discount)

You need a compelling reason for someone to purchase your product. Sometimes that can mean a discount. Other times it’s a perceived value – bundles paired with money-back guarantees. Maybe a 14-day trial before we charge you.  Or an added value like a free item with purchase.

Then again it could be that this widget really works and we have the testimonials to prove it (and others don’t).

The question is what will make your product, and by extension, your ad stand out from amongst your competitors? And compel someone to buy.

Sometimes we really don’t know the answer if you’re fairly new to advertising.  That’s why point three is – test. We’ll test various offers/ideas to see what resonates with your customers.

Create the Correct Campaign structures

First what most Facebook advertisers get wrong is that they think they know better than Facebook. It’s true that at one point by manually testing you could beat Facebook’s (Meta’s) algorithm. Not anymore.

Rather than fight against using Meta’s machine learning model you need to take advantage of it.

You should run CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) campaigns. And Ads should be DCTs (Dynamic Creative Tests).

But, and there is a big but… you need to understand how the system works.

There are three rules of thumb when using CBO and DCTs.  There are some very detailed and technical reasons why.  But rather than get lost in the weeds here are your three rules:

1. Scale and test in one campaign
2. One campaign per business objective
3. Do NOT add too many elements in your DCTs

Once you find a winner in your DCTs you’ll want to pull that out into its own ad set with other winning versions. This ad set should start performing very well. As you find continue testing you’ll improve the winners adset by replacing your worst performing ad with the winner from your testing (if it’s better by the numbers).

Select the Correct Audiences

Post-IOS 14 our position on audience has changed dramatically.  Because what worked before is no longer generating the best results now.

As a rule larger, broad audiences tend to work best for prospecting post-IOS 14. An additional benefit of using larger audiences is that it reduces ad fatigue and you’ll be able to use the same ad and creative much longer, sometimes indefinitely in a rotation.

Should you test different audiences?
YES. Unequivocally.
You should test some smaller, really well-defined audiences. Play with different interests, age groups etc..

You may find a group that consistently performs very well.

However now we often find that smaller audiences initially perform well but quickly get more expensive than broad audiences. Over the medium term (and sometimes now even the reasonably short term) small audiences tend to see CPMs rise and ROAS go down.

Creative & Copy & Offer Testing

Besides the big idea behind your ad, this is really the heart of your work and Meta Ads.

You have to test different creative.  This includes the following:

• Images
• Gifs
• Video
• Ad Formats

Of course, within each creative type, there are many sub-tests that you need to run.  For example with video, you’d want to test different types of videos.  An unboxing ad vs. product trailer vs. testimonial video.

And we need to get even more granular. The script matters, the people matter, motion graphics and production value, all matter. Because of that, you’ll want to test various versions of videos.

The same is true with images and gifs.

For your copy, you’ll need to test various value props, benefits, and USPs in your headlines. Along with different big ideas for your primary text.  Does long copy or short concise copy work better for your audience? Testing is the only way to really find out.

We talked about the importance of “big ideas” behind your ad. Offers are one type of big idea.

It’s happened before that we have an ad that by all right should have been a winner based on our prior experience. But performed in a mediocre way. The only change we made was changing a single line with a different offer – and all of a sudden ad performance exploded (in a good way).

All of that to say is the offer is important, and you’ll want to test different offers in your ads. Don’t overlook the importance of the offer. Along with the creative the buyer sees and the styles of text that he/she reads your offer is just as important or more.

Though testing never ends…
After implementing the strategies, we explored a men’s grooming brand. From ads, we made $100,938.42 in one quarter at a 99% Increase in Profitable Revenue.

Find out what we can do for you.

19.59x ROAS for Deodorant Brand and $22,613 in Revenue

When we took over this account in December, the brand struggled to produce sales from google ads.  ROAS was actually higher when we initially analyzed the account.

And while a 19.59x ROAS is very sexy…
Normally we’d want to see a lower ROAS because ROAS always comes at a trade-off. While it’s not a perfect inverse, generally the higher the ROAS the lower the total revenue.

However, in this case, we were working for a distributor of the brand who has very slim margins to work with.

Because of that, we had to prioritize ROAS while scaling as much as possible.
The result was a 19.59 ROAS (Min ROAS Target was 9x) and $22,613 in profitable revenue.
Proof below in the Adword Screen Shot and Google Analytics.

On the Facebook side we drove $23,395 in Revenue.

With a 10.84% from Facebook ad traffic, we were able to run very profitable ads for this natural deodorant brand.

Again the minimum ROAS we were shooting for was a 9x mutiplier. Because we worked with this client to create a compelling offer and “big idea” behind their ads, we were able to hit our ROAS targets. Well that and people loved the product.

After a period of initial testing we were able to identify 3 winning ads that drove 90% of the revenue.

Want profitable ads?

Get in touch: nick@chatblender.com
Or schedule a meeting: https://calendly.com/nicholasjulia/world-domination

Btw..
Because we want skin in the game, we can either charge by –

Adspend or a % of revenue generated by the ads.