In Q3 of 2021, Accretion Engine was contacted by a fitness e-commerce store searching for a partner to support a strategic growth initiative focused on maximizing revenue through the paid ad channel. The client had previously worked with a different partner who failed to meet their growth expectations at a 4X return on ad spend, meaning for every $1,000 spent $4,000 was generated. Confident we could outperform the previous partners' benchmark, Alo Media Group signed a contingency clause on generating greater than 4X return on ad spend.

Building Their Google Merchant Center

In order to implement any successful paid ad campaign from end-to-end one must first ensure that they’re launching off a solid foundation at the store level. Specifically that the store catalog and product page layouts are unique and user-friendly. In the case of this client, Alo Media Group completely overhauled and improved the user interface and experience. 

Once the foundation has been built, the traditional next step is to leverage Google’s native API to configure a data feed connection. The data feed connection ensures consistency across the store inventory and what is displayed on Google. The API is also capable of automatically updating product listings or inventory changes in real-time. 

In this specific engagement, Accretion Engine bypassed the native API and manually integrated the client’s e-commerce platform and product information with the Google Merchant Center. The manual connection allows for tactical enhancements at the store level while the campaign is live. 

The last step before designing and launching the campaign itself is to integrate the Google Merchant Center with the Google Ads account. This point-to-point integration ensures accurate bidirectional data flow and seamless product routing to Google Ads in the proper format. 

Structuring the Paid Campaigns

Following a deeper industry analysis and discovery process to ensure alignment on campaign outcomes, the AMG team proposed an approach combining three separate campaign channels:

• Google Shopping Campaign
• Branded Search Campaign
• Dynamic Remarketing Campaign

The strategy behind utilizing a blended approach of three campaigns is to maximize top-of-funnel traffic while retaining pre-qualified buyers who show a defined level of interest through redisplaying ads. 

At the search engine level, a Branded Search Campaign involves actively bidding on product-specific keywords. Whether a Branded Search Campaign will be truly effective is contingent on the competition within the industry. 

The role of the Branded Search Campaign was to capture anyone who specifically searched the branded names, whether they spelled it correctly or incorrectly. And our Dynamic Remarketing Campaign was the catch-all for non-converting visitors.

Google Shopping Campaigns cater to a lower cost-per-click (CPC) while delivering pre-vetted traffic. While Dynamic Remarketing Campaigns ensure ads are redelivered to visitors who viewed products but didn’t make a purchase. A combination of the two funnels more potential customers on the site which aligns with driving increased bottom line revenue. 

The Google Shopping Campaign is configurable and in order to determine campaign effectiveness, AMG began by executing a common A/B split test.

In this case, AMG initiated an automated Smart Shopping Campaign, where Google’s machine learning designs bespoke ads, and a Standard Shopping Campaign. Over the years we’ve found that Smart Shopping Campaigns perform better.

The theory behind this is Google’s algorithm allows Google to display products to the correct consumers and increase the click rate.

Optimizing Campaigns

Once the campaigns went live it was time to start optimizing.

One ofAccretion Engine’s daily optimizations is to add negative keywords to our standard campaigns. These are keywords that will prevent the ad from being triggered in the wrong kind of search.

For instance, if ‘x’ company sells women’s tennis shoes it may not make sense to add “high heels” as a negative keyword so the ad isn’t delivered to customers searching for “women’s dress shoes.”

Although this doesn’t entail bidding on specific keywords with shopping campaigns, Standard Shopping Campaigns still have the option of using negative keywords. Check out some of the negative keywords Accretion Engine added for this client:

Then, once there is adequate data, it’s possible to turn off non-performing products. This allows hyper-focusing ad spending toward products that are driving new revenue.

It only took Accretion Engine one month to notice that the Smart Shopping Campaign was significantly outperforming the Standard Shopping Campaign. This is a typical interval for data collection before making any major campaign decisions.

The results are displayed below. The cost per conversion was lower and the conversion value nearly doubled the standard campaign.

Based on this account's performance, AMG decided to pause the standard campaign altogether and rotate all resources into the smart campaign.

For the branded campaign and dynamic campaigns, there wasn’t a need for many optimizations aside from traditional monitoring search terms, daily budgets, and performance.