Sometimes with Google Ads, you lose potential revenue because advertising campaigns intercept total traffic. Or you waste your budget by not directing it to traffic that produces conversions. It is like reaching a destination by car along secondary roads that waste time and grind more kilometers. You don’t get there at your destination, or if you get there, you will have spent more money on fuel. This also works in Google Ads. The less you go to get the user to buy, the less budget you will invest.
The Case Study I’m about to show you talks about just this, that is, how we have increased earnings by saving on Customer Acquisition Cost (CPA). The same strategy can also be applied to your campaigns: you must have consolidated traffic and sales volumes over the months. It doesn’t matter if your e-Commerce sells in a different industry. You need a substantial amount of data. If, on the other hand, your e-Commerce and your advertising campaigns run at low speed with a limited investment, I refer you directly to my Guide to Investing in Advertising, in which I explain how to optimize every single euro spent, with much valid advice even beyond Google Ads.
Over the years, I’ve gotten my hands on Google Ads campaigns promoting products across dozens of industries. If I had to draw up a ranking of the most difficult, I would put the Adult sector on the podium. Now I’m working exclusively on Pepemio, and I want to talk to you about this brand (an Online Sex Shop that also promotes itself with advertising on TV). I guess you want to look at the site immediately: do it later, and stay focused for now. I want to clarify that there are some fantastic guys behind the scenes of Pepemio. Good campaign management is only a tiny part of their success. I think you, too, will know that there are always entrepreneurs who know how to make necessary, courageous, and decisive choices behind great results.
Initial Analysis
During the analysis, we realized that the customer acquisition cost was often higher than the average cart. I’ll translate the concept into figures: 27 euros were invested in acquiring customers who often spent less. Not the best for those who aim to sell while earning. For this reason, the following quarter, we set ourselves the goal of working on reducing the Customer Acquisition Cost. Unfortunately, Google Ads places limits in the Adult sector: for an Online Sex Shop, it is impossible to access all the artillery of tools made available by the platform. What does it mean? You can activate Search campaigns, but you cannot use Displays or Remarketing. In addition, Shopping campaigns have strict and limiting rules to follow.
Google Ads Campaign Optimization
What Have We Done?
We have completely restructured the account, and we have intervened in the optimization of the keywords. We’ve done a lot of cleaning up search queries (in this area, you have to deal with absurd search queries, as you can imagine… no, you can’t imagine). Subsequently, we weakened the questions that had CPA too high because they intercepted users in a phase too far from the purchase decision (at that moment, it was not convenient to contact them). Once we finished this painstaking work of excluding the search queries we didn’t want to appear for, we turned our efforts to keywords with a reasonable cost per conversion.
Having done this, we stopped analyzing the percentage of coverage of the keywords performing well. By range, I mean the rate of times my ad appears for specific keywords, in our case, those that generate results. Warning: this is an aspect often underestimated by those who manage campaigns, so be careful. Targeting bid adjustments was another robust optimization. We have granted a higher reach (thus offering more) to that target of people who have demonstrated a higher conversion rate. For example, an audience residing in certain regions, a well-defined age group, or even particularly profitable hours of the day.
Result Obtained: Orders + 12% And CPA -37%
Campaign performances improved immediately. It means there was a lot of room for optimization. You can see the current situation in the report extracted from Google Ads. Orders grew by 12%, but the most crucial goal achieved was the decrease in Customer Acquisition Cost. Before the optimizations, an average of 26-27 euros was spent per sale. Now the acquisition cost has dropped to 16-17 Euros. Translated: Now, you spend 10 euros less on Google Ads campaigns for each sale. Don’t you find it relevant?
Summary Of The 5-Step Strategy
I summarize the whole strategy below:
- Analysis of the cost per customer acquisition that you can sustain;
- Analysis of the phases of the purchasing process to understand which users to intercept (you have to make sure that each campaign communicates at the right stage);
- Cleaning up keywords and search queries that don’t bring results;
- Keyword coverage analysis with best CPA;
- Adjustment of bids on Target with better performance;
If your campaigns generate stable traffic and sales, you want to save on Customer Acquisition Costs. One important thing, though: before optimizing a campaign, you must create data because if you have not produced data and traffic, we cannot optimize. If, on the other hand, you have a considerable amount of data… you will indeed have the possibility to repeat the same improvement path.
Also Read: Benefits Of Having A Digital Menu In Your Restaurant
