How to Launch and Scale a PPC Campaign for Massive ROAS
What’s the secret to great Adwords Campaigns? View Pixel Productions case study on how to launch and scale a PPC campaign for huge ROAS.
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Case Study: Growing Riffraff Diesel Performance with PPC
How Pixel Productions Inc. started with smaller but highly successful Google PPC campaigns that generated enough value for the customer to confidently scale ad spend and Increase ROAS by over 100%.
What is ROAS?
ROAS is short for (return on ad spend) and it is part of the Google Ads bidding strategies to maximize conversions.
Before you can scale a PPC campaign, you have to have a baseline.
What are the Customer Goals?
A lot of times the customer only has a basic understanding of what they want to achieve with Adwords. It’s common to hear things like; I want more sales, I need more leads, I don’t want to spend a bunch of money without seeing a good return. With Riffraff, the initial goals were pretty simple;
1. Generate More Sales
2. Ensure there is a profit on sales taking ad spend and product margins into consideration.
How Do You Begin?
Layout an approach that can produce realistic results and meet client expectations.
1. Determine a base point for sales.
At the very start of the campaign we wanted to work towards a 10% increase in sales overall. So we look at the average online sales for a 30 day period as well as the average conversion rate for the store. It makes sense to compare each quarter and the sales for the entire year as well, just to get a clear picture of sales.
By understanding where sales are without ads and our target of a 10% increase in sales with ads, we have a pretty good place to start.
2. Determine a starting budget.
Establishing realistic goals on the front side is essential to the success of any PPC campaign, so let’s do the math:
Based on an average CPC of $1.12 we would require a budget of $4,000 per month to drive an additional 3,600 visitors and at an average order value of $240 with a conservative conversion rate of 2% this would provide a return of $17,280.
Using Google Ad forecasts, we can typically dial in a conservative approximation for return on ad spend. This is critical to provide a ‘starting point’ for actual costs and potential revenue for the strategy. The numbers we were presenting were very achievable. Good enough to encourage the client to commit to the ad spend, but not so good that it would lead to disappointment.
3. Determining the best starting strategy to achieve initial goals.
Every PPC campaign is different. Generally speaking for eCommerce, Google Shopping is a no brainer for a starting point. Based on product catalog and wholesale margins on products, we knew that we could take that minimal $4k a month budget and maximize the CPC using shopping ads.
In actuality, the first 30 days we spent $4,358.25 at a 2.37% conversion rate driving 5,646 clicks for a Total Conversion Value of $37,362.10
This was a 7.57% ROI or increase in sales.
4. Meeting Goals and Increasing Sales
Meeting and exceeding initial goals is always a good place to begin. In the first 30 – 90 days of a Google PPC campaign there is a lot of room to increase ROAS. The campaign is still young, building data and learning how to maximize conversion value. Pixel typically uses this 30-90 day period to adjust ad groups, target products and bids to maximize performance within the initial specified budget. This helps the client see real benefits before you begin prompting them to pony up for more impression share.
5. Scaling Up
After the first 90 days of a Google PPC campaign testing, we had laid a solid foundation for simply scaling this success. At the end of 90 days we were generating a 24% ROAS and we were only getting about 33% of the search impression share.
We have plenty of room to scale a PPC campaign for great results.
All we had to do was put more into ad spend and we would start seriously scaling performance and revenue. The screenshot below illustrates what happened when we convinced the client to increase ad spend by 50%.
Ad spend went from an average of $4,500/mo to $7,500/mo.
Average Conversion Value went from $70K to $300K.
6. Confidence to Scale More
After managing these ad campaigns, creating new campaigns and optimizing performance over the next few months, conversions increased, CPC went down, and Return on Ad Spend Climbed. Today, we are only limited by fulfillment. Simply put, Riffraff can’t physically ship more than they’re doing. This is a good place to be.
Currently, Riffraff doesn’t worry about ad spend.
Why? Because the return on investment is insane.
The screen grab above is for 1 year’s performance.
The total ad spend was $182K
But the Conversion Value was $11 Million in sales.
How Did We Achieve These Results?
For those of you who are wondering how we did this, we were able to launch this campaign from scratch and control every aspect of strategy and optimization. By proving efficacy, we were able to make sound recommendations based on proven results that the client was excited to embark on ultimately allowing us to scale a PPC campaign for massive results.
For obvious reasons, we’re not going to disclose every step of our process, but some of the tactics we implemented to scale the campaigns effectively are as follows:
- Increase revenue and conversion rate with dynamic remarketing
- Increase revenue and conversion rate with RLSA campaigns
- Protect brand by bidding on branded keywords
- Capture more conversions with higher search impression share
- Optimize shopping campaigns by experimenting with bidding, creating Smart Shopping Campaigns, and more.
If you’re an eCommerce store owner, chances are you’ll be able to use this same process and the same techniques to optimize and scale your own PPC campaigns. If you’re looking for help, let us know.
