Amazon Account Suspended Overnight: How We Scaled Google Ads 2.5x in 5 Weeks & Delivered a Record Trading Month

A client's Amazon account was suspended overnight, €1.5 million in monthly revenue gone, and we had five weeks to replace it with Google Ads. 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy  walks through a real crisis case study with a German fitness and home gym retailer, detailing exactly how the team scaled Google Ads spend 2.5x in five weeks. By redefining profit targets, isolating hero products, pushing proven campaigns to their profitable ceiling, and expanding into demand capture territory the account had never needed to touch before. 

Learn why already running on POAS through Profit Metrics rather than ROAS was the decision that made scaling possible without destroying profitability, and why good Google Ads management is ultimately about how fast and how smartly you can react to the business around it.

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

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Imagine this. You're a brand owner. You wake up one Wednesday morning and suddenly your biggest sales channel which has been really holding a massive part of your business and it's been a pillar of your business is suddenly just gone. No warning, nothing, no timeline for when it's back. That's exactly what happened to a client of ours. Um, We were running their Google Ads account and another agency, the Meta Ads account, and Amazon is something that they uh were native in and really good at, but it they suspended their account overnight. That's exactly what happened uh to one of our clients and in the 5 weeks after what we've done and what we've out of nowhere put together may have been one of the best case studies I've got. And why your Google Ads account is only ever as strong as your your ability to react to the business around it. By the time the dust settled, the business had actually posted its best trading month ever. Welcome back to Google Ads Unleash, guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday. Today's a bit of a different one because today I want to tell you a little bit about our recent win that we've had and which just reiterates how important the basics are and good marketing is. So, as I've said in the intro, um, a client panically rang me on a on big I think it was end of June, beginning of July, Jul, beginning of July. And essentially, they are a uh, fitness and home gym retailer with a very broad catalog based in Germany. Uh, they do stuff like resistance bands, 600B rowing machines, uh, paddle boards, uh, lots of equipment for round the now stuff like that. So, pretty common sort of um I'd say type of retailer. And he rang me. I have never had anyone with this much panic in their voice in 6 years of being in business. And he said, "Jeremy, something really, really bad has happened. Our Amazon ads account is gone." And everything with Amazon, €1.5 million in monthly revenue does turn off because of a small mistake that they made. Um, and he said, "What can we do to bridge this gap ASAP with Meta and Google?" So, we got into the war room with I know the Meta Ads guys really well and they're extremely good at what they do. And they of course mapped out a plan, but our plan was that we had to react to this uh uh quite fast. The account was sort of spending usually 30 to 40k a month. Met ads has done really well but because he wanted to run more profitably with a really really good me and with an either of sort of roughly 25% we never really pushed the button that much in Google because it was more of a mission of trying to be more profitable rather than just pushing. So we never really scaled past the 40k. Never really had a big uh need to then run demand gen and stuff like that because that wasn't a focus of the business. So one issue that we had was we had to very quickly replace the lost revenue to scale up at least 2 and 1/2 to 3x within a very very short amount of time and quite frankly the easy wins were pretty much gone. The account was already well optimized from having run it for a whole year in a really efficient matter between 30 to 40k and it's All of the additional loss revenue had to come from additional new territory. So we had to then react and the first thing that we've done is we shifted the target. We actually advised the clients on shifting the goalpost on tons of things within the business. So for instance, even our invoice uh delay it as much as possible, maximize your cash flow as much as possible, maximize uh you know pay everything late that you can. try and negotiate with all your um all your uh sort of uh stakeholders etc. So that's the first thing we've done. Then the second thing we've done is we redefined our goals. So Google has been running extremely uh well and extremely profitable due to the very mixed nature of the catalog. We've actually always been using profit metrics in this ad account. So we were already running on pas which actually saved our ass because if we had scaled with ROAS we would have been toast um and we said that from now on 15% CM3 so EVA is our goal okay um so we reduced it massively to have more buffer so that we could scale up then uh based on that we pushed our proven campaigns to the profitable ceiling so we had a daily budget recalibration against our power targets dropped the power targets as much as we could in order to get to where we wanted to go and to get the uh contribution margin uh slowly to where we kind of wanted to have it in order to maximize our spend. Then the second thing that we've done is expand on the demand capture side. So first of all we isolated the hero products. So rather than spreading budget evenly or putting on the uh sort of just a hero campaign and so on, we had some overstock products which came from from Amazon because they weren't selling on Amazon anymore. So they had to be sold differently. So we identified those hero products and built separate shopping campaigns, single shopping campaigns for each. So suddenly we had like 15 to 20 additional shopping campaigns with aggressive budgets every single day. And that really helped to put more ad spend on those products, okay? Because sometimes they might go under in a catch all or hero campaign and so on. Although they sold really nicely in there given that additional push. helped massively. The same goes for search. Search has always been not so good really for this ad account, but we overhauled all of the copy. We rebuilt the entire ad account again. We put focus products uh together. So, we focused on um only only sort of I'd say about 25 to 30 products that were selling well on Amazon to um sort of try and bid on there. As well, we also used AIAX and and we pushed the s*** out of it as much as we could. So, um that really helped. We also tried competitor campaigns. We also tried use case campaigns. So, sort of build advertorials or use repurpose existing advertorials for search volume which was out there and uh optimized the quality score as much as possible. So, this was a whole weekends of work which was absolutely crazy. Then we also uh used the demand uh push inside of uh Google uh not just the demand capture and asked the meta ads agency to uh put us together a huge brief of all of the profitable funnels that they were running with which ads etc etc that have been working well over let's say the past half year and um we implemented those in demand gen campaigns uh and not just uh shorts we also targeted instream we built marketing campaigns for which we built specific creatives and we also uh scaled images across discover and uh in feed etc etc. So naturally all of this uh dropped the CM3 quite a bit but it was okay. Um and what we also did uh to react to the sort of summer lull is that we ran a summer sale on top of this with countdown copy dedicated sale campaigns and daily man uh budget management through the promotional peak. So overall um when we actually uh done this we were able to grow the net revenue of the business from June to in July from 554K to 1.15 million. So we cleared the 1 million milestone which is absolutely insane. So we increased the number of new customers from 4,081 to 9,063 overall. Obviously, it's not just all of us, but Meta. Um the new customers uh went up like I said 122% in this case. Genuinely new buyers, which we've seen on GetClar. Um and Google Ads revenue grew actually 161% all non-brand um which was um outpacing the blended performance of the account. And the Google Ads spend scaled 2 1/2x X while holding profitability. So we went from about €40,000 in June, which was already quite sizable to uh about 110 uh,000 uh which is uh yeah, pretty good. That is about 2x, right? Um uh two double. Yeah, about Yeah, that's a bit more than 2 and a half. Yeah. Um blended CAC fell by 11% although spend scale worked really really hard. And um the advertised catalog expanded from 268 to 826 uh live products and our active campaigns more than doubled. We went from 13 to 28. Um and some of the products that we sold had up to 1,600% more conversions monthtomonth, which is absolutely insane because thousands and thousands of these products are sold. But all of this wasn't possible if the foundations hadn't been all there. The foundations were there. We had post track in proper um uh custom list. The feed was absolutely in tip-top shape. Uh our ads were already in tip-top shape. What we just had to do was to move the goalpost a little bit, actually get a sale, some sort of buying incentive for new customers on the site. I think without that it would have been genuinely hard. You have to get the meta ads guys in the same room, guys. We always book with the agencies that worked that helped to get all of the creators for demand gen. And you need to look at what the business is doing. You need to look at what has the impact from Amazon breaking away actually done to the business and what can we do to absorb this if for instance with all of their overstock etc. So speed in reacting to this and the uh way you react to this is not luck. is design, a lot of experience, and knowing what levers to pull when s*** hits the fan. Yeah. Um, total loss of a major channel to the best trading period on record for the online shop. Who would have thought? Um, it's a shame that it needed this kick up the ass, but I think it just goes to show that if you really want to pump the gas that it is possible. And if you want to pump the gas with us, You know where to go. Jeremy younganddigital.marketing. Send me an email. Head to the website younganddigital.marketing. You can book a onetoone with me via my kendley link or you can find me on LinkedIn, Jeremy and Google Ads and I would love to have a chat with you on there and maybe I can uh see and uh give you an audit on your ad account to see if there's any help. We've had a spectacular week of demand. We've had our biggest deal closed this week, which is amazing. Lovely to to see. Um, a huge company who's actually been listening to the podcast has come to us um uh to to start in September. But we've also had three more brands come to us this week. So, the places are really really tightening up. I'm not saying this for fake scarcity. We generally have like four or five slots, if at all, left over for this Q4. So, I'd highly encourage you get in touch before you don't. Also, leave a like and subscribe if you liked this content. This has been Jeremy Young, your personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.