How We Raised Sales by 252 % and ROAS by 83 % in Six Months: A Case Study

ATAN is an online eshop and a brick-and-mortar store that sells furniture. In 2015, it even got to the finals of the ShopRoku competition.

When its owner reached out to us, he was dealing with a problem: he needed his sales to increase, but the ROAS (return on ad spend) was way lower than what his company was aiming for at the time.

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We managed to fix that, I’m happy to say.

We raised Atan’s sales by 252.53%. And raised their ROAS by 83.76%, too.

And what else did we achieve?

• Conversion rate + 31.27%
• Traffic growth + 76.49%
• Number of pages per session + 14.62%
• Avg. session duration + 29.54%

Take a look at how We made it all happen, and feel free to use my tips to improve your own ad campaigns.

Or just get in touch with me. We'll be happy to help you just like We helped ATAN.

1. Search Campaigns

The client has had an active Google Ads account since 2016, and so far, he had hundreds of thousands of EUR. This was a tough one for us, since there were 34 campaigns running when we took over the account.

We knew that changes need to be made, and big ones at that. So we started by going through the account’s history and switching off ineffective campaigns and sets.

2. Search Campaign Optimization

Next, we optimized the campaigns that seemed the most promising.

We paid attention to:

• impression rate, impression share, average cost per click
• ‍costs, conversion values, ROAS (return on ad spend)
• location, demographics, user behavior etc.

We checked each and every search query. Then, we added those that linked to purchases into the campaigns as new keywords. And we took a look at all the negative keywords, too. Oftentimes, terms that end up on that list turn out to be a product that wasn’t available at some point. However, the company may have started selling it in the meantime.

Take a company selling chairs, for example. They have a wide range ofchairs available, but no desk chairs. However, the keyword “chairs”brings up search queries for “desk chairs” that aren’t part of our company’s product range. To avoid that, the company enters “desk” as a negative keyword. This stops ads from showing up under irrelevant keywords.
It may also get them in trouble once they add desk chairs to theirroster, though, as the negative keyword will continue to block their ads from reaching their customers.

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Next, we adjusted or added titles, descriptions and missing CTA (call to action) so that they fit the client’s unique selling propositions. We also checked all extensions and made sure they all have

• a sitelinks
• a descriptions
• callout extensions
• call extensions
• a location

Most of the time, we prefer working with Single Keyword Ad Groups since this campaign structure gives us better control over all displayed ads and their optimization. In this case however, it would have been a mistake to shut the active campaigns down. They have been running for 4 years already, which makes them a treasure trove full of data useful for optimization and future growth.

At the 2019 PPC Offline, Dalibor Klíč (Google Industry Manager) said that “the 8 largest eshops in Czechia and Slovakia allot 60% of their funds for shopping campaigns, which bring in 60–70% of conversions." That’s why we, too, pulled money from search campaigns, so that I could reinvest it into shopping campaigns.

A TIP: If you’re an eshop working with eCPC, make sure you set your optimization to conversion value. It’s how you let Google know that you’re not trying to get a lot of low-value orders, but rather a smaller number of orders that bring in higher revenues. You’ll save a lot of time and spend less money on distribution, too.

3. Shopping Campaigns

‍Machine learning and neural networks, utilized by Google Ads, are what sets it apart from other marketing systems. They learn from past conversions and adjust costs per click and targeting accordingly, gradually increasing your ads’ effectiveness.

Because this client already had a very long history with numerous conversions having taken place, we had plenty of data available, which we could use to power machine learning. Therefore, we started running a Smart Shopping Campaign, combining classic shopping campaigns with dynamic remarketing.

Google usually recommends marketing all your products via a single Smart Shopping Campaign but if you have a range of differing product margins, it’s better to keep these separated and run one Smart Shopping Campaign for each group. Always keep in mind that each of your campaigns must get at least 20 conversions per 45 days, in order to have enough data for the AI to learn from, though.

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4. Shopping Campaign Optimization

One thing that you always have to do for every Smart Shopping Campaign is to optimize your XML feed. This is where tools like Mergado come in handy.  

A lot of every campaign’s success comes down to the picture of your product, as it is the first thing that catches your potential customers’ eye. That’s why we made sure all of my clients’ pictures come in high enough definition and that there’s a white background, with our product placed nicely at the center of the photo.

We also checked multiple other things, like its title, description, EAN, and parameters like size, weight, color, material etc. Big kudos to Atan’s in-house team for doing a very good job on these.

A TIP: When usure whether to try running a Smart Shopping Campaign, check if you’re sending Google Ads the right data via remarketing code, first.

5. Data Studio

To make ours reports as convenient and transparent as possible, we use Data studio, so that all metrics and graphs are always just a click away.

We’ve also imported cost data from comparison sites (Heureka and Zboží.cz) into Google Analytics, so that they show up in the Data studio overview as well.

6. Results

All these changes bore great results, bringing in a great deal of growth for ATAN. Its sales rose by 252.53%. And its ROAS raised by 83.76%.

Curious if your sales could skyrocket like that as well? Let's get in touch.

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