Optimizing PPC to Make a Retail Brand Profitabile

The recipe that returned a struggling retail brand to profitabilityAs many already know, we are an education first business. You may ask; what does that mean anyway? Helping people is in our blood and what we care about most. Our behaviour reflects an approach of tirelessly educating or assisting our audiences without asking for anything in return. It is no exaggeration to say that we have never asked anyone for their business, which is all the proof we need that doing the right thing and helping others will have its rewards. Hence – our identity as an education-first marketing and advertising agency. In 2017, WSI Paid Search was earmarked as a Premier Partner with Google because of the results we were achieving for our clients. Premier Partners are the highest-level of Partner an agency can achieve with Google. Our Managing Director was also invited to join the Google Agency Executive Council for Canada.

Here’s why this matters for our clientsSince then we’ve done more in-person educational events with Google around North America than any other agency. Period. Google themselves describe the success of our events as the pinnacle of educational events. These are typically a half-day of educational keynote presentations from Google and WSI, at Google campuses in every major city and not one of them has any sales pressure attached to it ever.

How this translates into exponential growth for our clientsFollowing one of these events with Google, we conducted and presented a free live audit of this retail brand’s Google Ads campaigns. The main audit issues identified were:

1. Conversion tracking used last click attribution.

2. There weren’t enough new things (campaign types, testing, experiments)

3. Mobile ConvR was 2.5% vs. Computer ConvR of 4.05% and they were spending hardest on mobile

4. Campaign types were only Shopping and Search, with no Remarketing, Dynamic Remarketing or Dynamic Search Ads.

5. Impression share was 29% with 64% lost to ad rank and 8% lost to budget. This is a very high penalty for ad rank.  Too high.

6. Geo-targeting was country-wide, and needed to be broken down to state level for best optimization opportunities

7. And there was no competitor related activity whatsoever, neither defensive nor offensive

The return to profitable growthThe retailer asked us if we could help them fix their campaigns, and that’s exactly what we did. First we maximized what was there by lifting, shifting and optimizing what they had. We made cuts to low volume and high CPA pieces of their campaigns and improved their bidding strategy. We increased their shopping campaign impression share and inserted missed opportunities like video ads, discovery campaigns, competitor campaigns and increased the budget spend to go after as much market share as was reasonably possible.

The results to prove itIn the first 8 months of the campaign, during the period of the 2020 pandemic, we increased their online sales by 18K online purchases with return on ad spend of 18 to 1 and revenue of $USD 6.3 million.  We are still working on these campaigns today with ever increasing results. If you would like to know how we can do the same for your business, in a relaxed chat to plot your way to advertising greatness, we can set up a  45-minute teleconference with the managing director of WSI Paid Search to discuss your PPC needs, problems or questions. Our job is simply to be useful to you in these meetings – rest assured we’ll only be focused on bringing you maximum value.  Contact heidi@wsipaidsearch.com