Case Study: How We Doubled Google Ads Spend Profitably in 30 Days

Struggling to scale profitably on Google Ads? 

In this episode of Google Ads Unleashed, host Jeremy breaks down a real-life case study showing exactly how Young & Digital turned a stagnant account into a high-performance growth engine—boosting ad spend and profits at the same time. Learn what changes actually moved the needle, from feed optimisation to smart bid strategies.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

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Transcript

Hello guys, and welcome back to Google Ads unleashed. Hope everyone is doing fantastically this Monday. So today I'm going to talk you through a tiny case study of ours, and it is about a brand that we recently onboarded at the beginning of March, roughly, and actually, sorry, at the beginning of April, and we have been sort of encountering a bit of a classic case here. This is a meta first brand who have come to one of our business partners who for for advice on meta ads. And they received fantastic advice. They've grown a business where in the last month alone, or last 30 days alone, they've turned over about 130,000 euros with 40k in ADS. So that's about a blender drawer. So 3.2 and they have generated a sensational net profit of 45,000 euros. That's not so bad, right? I have fantastic margin. So overall, the MERS about 30% ncpa is about 13 euros. So they have come to us because they have always been struggling with Google. Once they've put all their effort into meta and fair play, it is the biggest spender. It spends about twice as much as Google, but two and a half times as much as Google. But they've always been struggling to achieve some sort of growth on Google ads, okay? And the reality was they just didn't know what they were doing. Okay, they had a friend of theirs who was sort of running the ads, but the reality was, these guys weren't really doing anything. When I looked into the ad account, famous example I mentioned a few times in the last few weeks, I still saw messaging from Black Friday, right, which is a complete disaster. So on we went, and we have, in my opinion, transformed totally where they are now, in terms of revenue and in terms of profit. If we actually look at last 30 days, there's no seasonality with this product versus the previous period, and apply that, then we see a total turnover increase of 50% we've spent 55% more in ads, and we've also had 46% more net profit in the last 30 days versus the previous period. In the last 30 days, we spent 27k on meta ads, about 10k on Google. And if I actually look at the previous 30 days, which would be 23rd to the 24th Sorry, I'm just looking at triple whale data. Live here, then we spent. The data is loaded only 6k on Google, so we spent 4k more, and we spent 10k less on meta ads, and made that much more revenue. So what do we do? Of course, there was a sale in between the Easter sale, which does sort of skew the data a tiny bit, okay, but it is, of course, a massive success, and I'm going to let you know how we did that on Google ads. So just to run you through some some more sort of data, potentially, you can see this on the video version, but I'm on a little bit of I can't say who it is, so we would have to gray out the data and the name of the business. So if we look at the data, give me a second. I'm just going to be sharing this on the screen. You can see all of the sort of conversions by conversion time in the ad account. Now I'm aware that this isn't really an indicator of how well and a channel is doing, but we're seeing if in the post purchase survey data, and we're seeing in the in triple where first click attribution and total impact attribution, and even TA, which is very similar to on platform anyway, that we are driving many, many new customers, and we can see the following. So at the beginning of February, we used to spend about 2000 to one eight per week, with about 150 to 200 conversions recorded in the ad account per week. And now, since the end of March when we stepped in, we went from about one half case spend and 200 conversions to the week after to 1602 and two and a 40 conversions. And then we went to. Two and a half k in spend with 260 conversions. And then we last week, we spent over 3k with over 340 conversions tracked. And if we look at the last 30 days versus the previous period, we see that this increase in conversions comes from our non branded shopping campaigns, which we finally split the branded out, which is why we've been able to actually reduce spend on branded and spend more on non brand, which is one essential part of how we got this to grow. We've got gone a little bit down on our prospecting campaign, but that's because the conversion value has been split with an experiment that we're running. We created the DSA campaigns, and this is additional sales out of nowhere which weren't really there before. We created a competition campaign which wasn't there before, either. Very unusual for that to work anyway, but it's something that we wanted to try, and we're quite keen to try. And of course, we had a quite significant increase in our p max, where we are spending more, and we've had quite a significant increase in branded sales. So if I look at the conversions. By conversion time, we've had 412 more in branded sales, of which we've had a total increase. Give me a second of 150 through brand, and that means 260 more sales from non brand, which is quite good, right? So that's exactly what we want. So how did we achieve that? I can tell you how we achieve that. So if we look into the data, more or less, we did the basics properly. So first of all, we had a look on the site, and had a look what can be improved on the site, we saw quite a few spelling errors. So this client is based in Germany, and Germans very difficult language. So first of all, we saw quite a few spelling errors, which probably would have diminished sort of trust a little bit. And we also did a bit of a competition analysis, in fact, using AI in order to understand what kind of suggestions we can put on the site to increase sort of the the trust with potential new visitors. Then in the second step, we talked about goals, so the client had, to my dismay, not really a good idea of what constitutes a a good budget mix between meta and Google. He didn't really understand what a good blended ROAs looks like. He didn't really understand what a good mer looks like, and we simply calculated that right? We went through various scenarios, what good break even ROAs would look like, how we arrive at that conclusion, etc, which allowed us, in many cases, to bid more aggressively as well. Some of the campaigns on target ROAs 400 some of them are 450 some of them had target CPA. Some of them were manual bidding. It was a complete disaster. So just streamlining all of that really helped us to actually push ad spend and to get new customers in. And sometimes it's as easy as that, we quickly debated whether we wanted to do any profit tracking or anything, but I felt this would be an over engineered solution at this stage of the business. Then in the next step, we actually looked at the feed. We implemented the CSS, right so to save on click costs, which is a very common feature in Europe, then we also made sure that the feed was completely optimized from A to Z, right, no exceptions. Product titles are fully optimized. We swapped out all product images which were disapproved. We did, of course, the keyword research to understand what kind of other stuff people could be searching in order to expand ours, our our our appeal in on, on the SERP we looked into,
we looked into the product feed, right. There was a lot of data in there missing, such as G tin, such as other things which need to be fixed so that reviews could show properly. Reviews are already there. So that was fine. So that looked really good, and at the end, we've got now in Merchant Center, more or less no errors anymore. It's not even saying any missing colors or anything. It is completely, fully optimized from A to Z and. That, of course, has helped the quality of the ads massively. Then we got into the media buying, we did a complete overhaul of this ad account. Okay, so the first thing that we've done is we've overhauled all assets. They were to a total disaster. There were not many site links at all. They were automatically created assets which didn't make any sense. They were not even image extensions. There was nothing right. So we did a full overhaul of that and got the messaging correct, and got the assets to a nice level where they will actually add value to our ads. We also went through all of the assets and p max, because a lot of them were very out of date. A lot of them were very sort of NAF to it, to be honest. So they were all replaced, and now we have up to date assets, and of course, that produces much better ads and and better results in that regard. Then in the next step, we actually built out the ad account with a proper shopping brand or non brand split. We built an additional DSA campaign, which wasn't a thing before. We then restructured the search campaign completely. First of all, we did a we restructured all of the ad groups because there were a lot a lot of keywords with poor quality scores, right? So we've just written bad ads that are better tailored to that. We then also implemented a, our first AB test, which was against broad match, because we theorized that a lot of people say very, call this product very by different names, and they have different variants of that product as well. So potentially, broad match would do really well. And within a week, it showed instantly that broad match massively outperformed the potpourri of different match types that was present previously in the prospecting campaign. So with that, we applied that and already had good results. And now at the moment, we're testing the home page, which was the previously targeted page, versus the full collection page, and early indication shows that that is performing at a CPA, three euros cheaper than the initial campaigns, very early days. So can't really say if, if it would actually be performing, but we're about 40 to 50 conversions in so the data is looking pretty good at this stage. We also overhauled the ad copy in there, like I said, and something that we also did is implement the correct bid strategy, target ROAs everywhere, then we have, we implemented a competition campaign. It doesn't really have many competitors, and people who look for this kind of product really know what they're looking for. So in these cases, competition campaigns really can make sense, and with that, we've added a few additional sales already, especially because one competitor actually has gone bust as well. So this is something that you can only know when you really work with a client, and as a result, people will be disappointed not finding this competitor anymore in the ads. As a result, we see, of course, that we can pinch those sales when people are looking for a competitor, the quality scores terrible on them, but there's nothing we can really do about them. Nonetheless, it is still performing nicely. Then we had a second search campaign, which was for a particular angle, we did exactly the same. Slapped on broad that is what seemed to be working better. We overhauled the ads. Made sure the settings are all okay, etc, etc. Oh, one thing as well. We added Austria everywhere, very easy, additional wind as well, through which we could grow, we would have expected to only really see 10% more sales by adding Austria, because it's only 10% of the population of Germany. But of course, it we've we've grown beyond that, even in in that location too, which is quite nice. Then in that campaign we're testing currently. Target CPA is very early days, but it's not target CPA, sorry, target ROAs, which is the prevailing bid strategy in the ad account, and from all I can see is that we are actually outperforming there by half of the CPA as previously with the and actually hit the target, ROAs now on this, on this campaign, which is super nice to see, so hopefully, fingers crossed, we will be, yeah, see seeing this campaign turn around, and we can keep that live as well. Then in the next one with brand, we overhauled brand by. They add in different ad groups for what people are searching for. The two main things that people are searching for were first reviews. So there were people who heard of the brand, but wanted to make sure, is this company legit. What do other people say about it, etc. So we built a specific landing page for that. The second thing that we did is that we built a landing page for people who search a discount code so that we could give them a proper discount code. That has really helped, because unfortunately, these kinds of search terms underperformed compared to normal branded searches. Now they perform it just as equally well, so that's helped drive more sales on brand which may have otherwise been lost. So this is a case to be made where brands sometimes can be, not a bad idea. That being said for me, we're actually going to be testing the geo holdout on brand to see how incremental it really is. My prediction is it won't be we actually been able to drop the number of sorry, increase the ROAs massively as well. We switched away from manual CPC to target impression share. This was a test that we run as well, and it seemed to be massively more efficient. We have had 80% more conversions, which, of course, was driven by more impressions to part as well. But ROAs has increased by 40% on the brand campaign. Then we went into p max and set all the settings straight in there. Like I said, we set the target ROAs there too. We overhauled all existing assets. We didn't really change the assets. So normally I would have had one asset group or one empty asset group, and that's about it for p max, but unfortunately, on this account, it's already been like sort of a legacy setup, so we didn't really want to change the winning team, if you like, too much. So we just awaiting now how that performs to see if we maybe can cut away some of the asset groups, or if we have to make them even more specific, we are also assessing, at the moment how effective they really are. Early indicators show from our p max insight script that probably it is overspending massively on search and not that effective. So we'll have to see what we're going to do about that. And then we introduced demand gen as well. So we've taken all of the best performing creators of all time, slapped them into a demand gen campaign on YouTube shorts, and we are testing that now for our client too, and yeah. So hopefully that'll drive revenue up too. We will see next week. We only launched this on Monday, which was the 21st it's on the 28th of April. So when you hear this podcast, it'll be a few weeks ahead already, you will actually see potentially some results then already, of driving incremental sales and awareness of the brand. So you see nothing fancy. All it was is do a feed. Work properly, do your homework properly. Of what a good goal is, optimize towards that properly. Cut away everything that doesn't work, reinforce more what does work. And that is how you drive more sales. And the numbers don't lie. Yes, we spend 10k more in in on matter, but we almost double spend on Google ads as well, and we have seen net profit actually be stable in terms of percentage of total sales and actually scale up with the sales. And if you want results like that as well. Please. Do get in touch. Do not hesitate. I would love to hear from you. It's Jeremy and Google ads. You'll find me on LinkedIn. You'll find me at Young at Digital dot marketing, and you can always send a message, and we can see if we could do the same for you. This has been Jeremy Young, your personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.