1. Background

This eCommerce business sells indoor and outdoor wall lights to consumers. The owner had been running Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search and Shopping campaigns to very little success, achieving an average Cost per Acquisition (CPA) of £76.04. Frustrated with the lack of progress, they contacted the Ninjas.

2. Objective

Our objective was to increase sales and improve the average CPA across the Paid Search and Shopping campaigns.

3. Strategy

The original PPC Search campaign was set to target a large number of their products. This can be a common approach in self-managed campaigns, because the thinking goes that increasing the number of products advertised will increase the total sales. However, this is rarely the case unless the business has a huge budget.

With very little targeted focus, this ‘spread it thin’ approach was costing the business a considerable amount on unprofitable products and audiences.

When we took over the PPC account, our priority was to narrow down the targeting to top-level keywords and focus on the broader terms that the Shopping campaign may not pick up on. We re-wrote the ads for the PPC campaign using the new extended format (which allows us to provide more USPs and information to compel the user to click) and made sure that we had implemented the relevant ad extensions.

The Google Shopping campaign was previously set up to promote all products on the website. With a limited budget, this led to the client quickly reaching their maximum spend each day, and meant they were missing out on vital conversions for their best-performing products. We segmented the products into relevant product groups and focused only on promoting the bestsellers, and those with the highest ROI. We also adjusted the bids to ensure that the bestselling product group ads would be more visible in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) space.

Using the historical data gathered from the old campaigns, we set up an ad schedule to ensure that we were bidding more during times that had previously led to the highest volume of sales. This also allowed us to preserve our daily budget and spend as little as possible during other times, which avoided the previous situation of the ads not being shown due to a lack of budget.

4. Package

The client was on a 2 Action PPC (Search) and Shopping Campaign package.

5. Results

The results of changes we made to the campaign were astonishing. After just one month, sales had increased by 63.25%, while the average CPA had dropped by 54.1%. This was the highest level of continual sales the company had seen during their history of running Paid Search campaigns, and it also meant that they achieved a positive ROI after just one month of our management.

Whilst it’s rare to achieve such phenomenal growth in just the first month of the campaign, it does illustrate the amount of low-hanging fruit that can be picked up in self-managed Google PPC campaigns by an experienced professional PPC manager.