Outdoor Gear & Equipment Brand

from $22,000/mo spend with 8.2x ROAS to $57,000/mo spend with 8.1x ROAS

outdoor equipment gear brand google ads case study

Why were they looking for help?

  • Google was their main marketing channel, but ROAS and Revenue kept declining ever since the 2023 summer season ended
  • They needed to scale Google efficiently ASAP

Why were they looking for help?

  • Performance Max campaigns included sales coming from brand keywords
  • Top spending products had only 1-2 size & color variants available (leading to low conversion rates and wasted spend)
  • No product reviews and no GMC promotions were enabled
  • Dynamic remarketing not working because of broken Remarketing tags and missing Display ItemIDs in the feed
  • Un-optimized product feed (no additional product attributes, poor product title naming, mismatched product images to color variants)
  • Branded Search spending up to $7 per click
  • Prospecting Search spending $1000 per month with 0 purchases
  • Last customer list uploaded in 2017
  • New products were not being advertised due to poor campaign segmentation and subdivision

What was done to fix it?

  • First, we got started on the product feed
    • We optimized product titles, showing the most important info in the first 70 characters, then adding additional attributes in the remaining 80 characters
    • We added custom labels that will later help in product segmentation between campaigns, making sure there is no overlap between campaigns and new products are synced to Google automatically
    • Implemented Sale and Compare to prices to leverage “Sale” and “Price Drop” badges in our Shopping Ads
  • Secondly, we made a strict segmentation between brand and non-branded campaigns
    • Simply adding a brand exclusion list to pMax campaigns does not work – in 9 out of 10 cases, branded terms will still be present in the pMax campaign.
  • Then, we made sure we were being as efficient as possible on branded searches
    • With no one competing for their branded keywords, paying $5-7 per click was absurd
    • By choosing the wrong bid strategy (suggested by Google), they were wasting up to $1000 a month just on branded search campaigns alone
  • Lastly, the campaign segmentation
    • With more than 8,000 items in their GMC, their campaigns had overlapping products, stealing data from each other, and new products were not being added to the campaigns
    • We implemented a lean 4-campaign setup, focusing on pushing the best-performing and most profitable products first
    • By adding up-to-date customer lists, audience signals, and search theme insights, we were able to target much more relevant search queries and show the right products to the right audiences
    • By fixing the remarketing setup, we made sure that we were also leveraging the dynamic remarketing ads, which ended up generating on average a 9x ROAS
    • The 4-campaign setup has now evolved to 6 campaigns, where we further split the products into best-performers and “zombies”

The Results

By focusing on perfecting the product feed and GMC (the backbone of Shopping ads), and implementing an efficient campaign segmentation, we were able to grow the account from $22,000/mo spend with 8.2x ROAS to $57,000/mo spend with 8.1x ROAS in 5 months