The Business

The Tool Store Canada is a family-owned hardware store selling high-quality woodworking tools in Canada. They were initially a physical store only, but COVID-19 forced them to focus more on online sales.

What the Objective Was

The Tool Store Canada reached out to Thinkplus to help them scale their online sales. Their business target was to double total (including offline) monthly sales from CA$100,000 to CA$200,000, with online contributing at least a quarter of this.

Given their small budget, we set ourselves an aggressive PPC target of hitting CA$20,000 per month within six months. When we took on the PPC management (in August 2021), their website was generating CA$17,600 of monthly revenue, with PPC contributing just CA$3000 of this.

How We Achieved It

The Package

Our client started on a medium-sized marketing campaign including Google Ads, Conversion Rate Optimisation and Email Marketing.

The Strategy

Due to a restricted ad spend and limited product range, we established that the only traffic we could really target was highly commercial product-focused searchers and branded traffic. As much as we’d love to target top-of-funnel traffic, provide DIY downloadable guides etc., with the budget available, we knew we needed to be precise and commercially focused on fast ROI.

Shopping campaigns were central to our strategy as we could show searchers the SKUs in stock and price-qualify anyone clicking (thus preserving precious budget). Budget constraints showed us that we needed our shopping campaigns to have incredibly tight product targeting — and target the highest converting products from the offset.

We also opted to provide support with email marketing to increase the client’s customer lifetime value. This was a marketing channel the client wasn’t utilising at all and one we believed would be highly impactful for the campaign.

The Results

Within four months, we had more than tripled total website sales to CA$54 thousand per month. PPC contributed CA$27.7 thousand per month from an ad spend of CA$1,691. This graph shows the month we took over (their campaigns still running while we got ourselves set up) vs month four in November 2021:

In the same period, we reduced the CPA from CA$189.79 to CA$23.56 and achieved a ROAS of 1583% and a total ROI of 110.44%.

This graph shows the website’s revenue increase from when we launched the advertising campaigns on Google Ads for this client in August 2021. It took us approximately three months of running live ads to start seeing significant growth. This is as expected with businesses beginning to advertise on Google for the first time, as there is no historical data to work from.

During month one, Google is acquiring the data we need to make informed decisions when optimising ads. In month two, we are making data-driven decisions and changes to the campaign. In month three, the impact of our data-gathering and optimisations starts to be seen as campaigns gain traction and perform better. We expect to see an even larger increase moving forward with campaign optimisations and testing different bidding strategies and campaign types.

During the first six weeks of the email campaign, email marketing achieved an excellent 41% average open rate and 1.46% conversion rate. This generated CA$3,624.30 (12 conversions), of which CA$757.68 (four conversions) were assisted conversions. We expect to see results continue to improve over time.