How a leading beauty equipment and supplies retailer grew Google Shopping revenue by 60% with 20% less ad spend

Background

The client’s mission is to help their customers create successful businesses by providing quality salon and spa equipment at an attainable price. Based in the United States, they built their business from the ground up and now service over 150,000 salons and spas worldwide.

The client’s website is the most critical asset their team has to reach their customers, new and existing. Google Ads, and specifically Google Shopping, is the main growth engine for profitably acquiring customers.

They were an early adopter of Google Ads, having used the platform for several years prior to 2021. It was this experience and their internal numbers that told them a change was needed. Google Shopping campaigns weren’t performing to their standards, and they felt they needed to go in a different direction to solve the problem.

The Opportunity

This leading retailer conducted a search for a paid marketing provider that extended beyond their personal networks. If they were going to drive the results they needed, it was important they hired the right team: a team that understood the ins and outs of Google Shopping Ads and Google Merchant Center, could execute a plan to fix their performance problems, and, most importantly, gel with their internal team.

This retailer contacted Granular late in the evaluation process after speaking to several other highly qualified agencies throughout the country, unable to find a partner with the “it” factor… Frustrated with the process, their head of marketing, turned to Google’s Partner website and found us on the Work With A Partner page.

The leadership team at this retailer made it clear to Granular that there were a number of hoops to jump through, and we’d have a lot to prove. Granular’s offices are several hundred miles from the retailer’s headquarters, adding complexity to the vetting process. The timeline to review the Google Ads account and share insights with a plan was extremely narrow.

Granular accepted the challenge and conducted a thorough audit of this retailer’s Google Ads account. A presentation was made, sharing specific insights into what ailments were affecting the advertiser’s Google Shopping performance. In addition, Granular answered specific questions on how our team would help navigate them through the upcoming holiday season. And then when that work was done, Granular would need to develop a plan for migrating traffic from traditional Google Shopping campaigns into Smart Shopping campaigns.

After an intense deliberation process, their team awarded Granular the work.

Granular’s Solution

The existing Google Shopping campaign setup was overly simplistic and frankly against best practices: One standard shopping campaign housed all products with minimal segmentation of product types or even brand.

Granular made optimizations within the existing Google Shopping campaign during the week of BlackFriday through Cyber Monday so as to not jeopardize performance during the critical BFCM period.

In the month of December, Granular implemented a tiered smart shopping campaign structure. We analyzed product types by historical return on ad spend (ROAS) and implemented a campaign and bidding strategy that maximized their exposure while still providing budget to other product types. While both teams were thrilled to see performance immediately shift for the better, the ultimate focus was planning the best long term strategy for Google Shopping campaigns.

In July 2022, however, Google threw a wrench into our plans. Google Ads shifted all Smart Shopping campaigns to an entirely new format called Performance Max, completely derailing our strategy outlined earlier in the year. There was zero precedent for how this campaign type would perform as it was brand new from Google Ads.

Granular leveraged its relationship with Google as a Premier Partner to understand all of the ins and outs of Performance Max. With all of the uncertainty surrounding this, we benefited the most from the confidential client’s trust in executing the transitioning. Having a true partnership with their marketing team alleviated all concerns, however, and we moved forward with confidence.

A Thoughtful Transition to Performance Max

Granular had several factors to consider when transitioning to Performance Max. While the existing Smart Shopping campaigns showed across Google’s Display and YouTube inventory, Performance Max was going to do this in a more significant way.

Our team worked with the confidential client to get the assets required: headlines, descriptions, images, logos and videos that would show an on-brand digital ad experience while still driving results.

With the shopping-specific component of the Performance Max campaigns, Granular needed to ensure the shopping feed populated correctly, uploading the right products into their respective campaigns. Also, Performance Max campaigns presented a different approach to bid strategy, so Granular needed to experiment prior to the holiday season in Q4.