Google Ads Account Structure for eCom Brands

When I complete a review or take on the management of a Google Ads account for an E Commerce brand, I find a very common theme that none of these accounts have an overarching strategy for how they're going to increase the sales for all of their products, not just their tier one best selling products. How they're going to successfully increase and then decrease spending throughout their high peak and off season pricing, where quite often brands will spend more in a certain season and then less on their ad budgets in other parts of the year. And then finally, finally what is the overarching strategy for how they're going to be using all of the different types of Google Ads campaigns that they have at their disposal. And since the introduction of performance max campaigns, I am fast seeing that this is becoming the number one problem that E Commerce brands have to solve if they want to see success with Google Ads. And the absence of an overarching strategy throughout the total Google Ads account is the exact problem that I saw for an account that I completed a review on for last week. Now this account was of a well known E Commerce brand here in Australia and over the past 12 months they've seen growing sales and growing brand recognition. So they turned to a larger ecommerce agency here in Australia who are the self proclaimed leaders for growing E commerce brands here in Australia. And then over a long term period the only thing that they successfully achieved is tripling their ad spend while reducing the total revenue by by 9%. Yes, you heard that right. This so called leader for how to scale brands in the E commerce space using Google Ads was only able to achieve tripling the amount that this client paid every single month in ad spend while also reducing their total revenue by 9%. Now I do have to give it to them that that is a special kind of skill that you can continue to sell and charge your management fee while the client is seeing increasing ad costs, increasing and decreasing revenue. And let me show you how drastic this was. I've broken this down to quarterly analysis for you so that we can see that this is an ongoing trend and just not a one week or a one month little blip in performance. And right here is where the client was running its own Google Ads campaigns. They were spending about $8,000 each quarter and getting over $135,000 in sales with a really high performing conversion value cost of 16.65. And that was the client's first little dip in the water. Then they went into their low season and then they engaged this agency just end of the first quarter who started to rapidly increase their spend. And you can see all the way up to here. Whereas in the third quarter they were spending 24,000 and only getting 124,000 in return for sale. So as you can see, they've tripled the sales, going from 8,000 all the way up to 24,000. But the sales were declining and even in some cases went down by 10%. The interesting thing about this is if you took away the cost metric, you'd be saying that this campaign has just been left alone and it's just maturing and trudging along night. But this is where the shock comes in, is that you can see that they've tripled the spend for no further return. And at that same time, as you'd expect, their cost per conversion has been going up from $8 all the way up to $30. And this is for an apparel brand, so that is way over the top in acquisition costs. And their cost per conversion value, which was a healthy 16 and a half percent, has gone all the way down to five. And this is just one example. But sadly, this has been a trend that I've seen time and time again this year. And I put this down to two core reasons. Firstly, some agencies and businesses are making the mistake of only focusing on their ROAS targets and their roas bidding and paying no attention to the number of impressions or more importantly, the total conversion value that their campaigns are generating. And while this wasn't the case in this particular example I showed you, I've had agencies openly tell me that the reason for why they reduce the spending, which also reduces the total amount of revenue that they are generating for the client, is so that they can achieve higher ROAS scores, which then trigger management fee bonuses for their own agency. So you do need to be careful, because sometimes 100% focus on ROAS can result in the situation where you're paying your management fees or your agencies more and more money while your business is getting less and less revenue. And just to be clear, monitoring your ROAS is a very important metric that you do need to monitor, but you can't monitor it while you're sacrificing your total revenue for a success in Google Ads, you need to make sure that while your ROAS is going up, you're also seeing an increase in the total number of impressions and also the total revenue that your business is receiving. And the second biggest issue that a lot of agencies and business owners make when it comes to running Google Ads for the Ecommerce store or the ecommerce brands is that they don't have any overarching strategy for the total Google Ads account. And what I want to make clear here is that I'm not talking about the strategy for individual campaigns, I'm talking about the strategy for the total Google Ads account. So what we're talking about here is how you're going to be setting up your individual campaigns and your individual campaign types so that you can target all of the things that you need to do in your business for success. Because the hard fact is that your account structure is more important than your individual campaign structures. And it is the secret sauce for how you can see how success with Google Ads for your ecommerce brand. And the reasons for why this is so important is firstly, it allows you to optimize product category performance. It's very common that the majority of E commerce brands will have products that have a seasonality to it. So for example, you might be a clothing brand and you have a different range of products for the summer months versus your products for the winter months. And sometimes those two different types of products can have very different audiences that appeal to very different markets. So that's why you need to make sure that your account structure is set in a way that you can profitably target those very different types of products in the different seasons of the year. Also, having the correct account structure allows you to successfully run high peak, high volume seasonal sales without ruining the long term performance of your always on campaigns. Say for example your Black Friday Christmas period. A lot of brands will generally run a lot higher ad spend in those seasons and then it will taper off in that first quarter of the year. So you need to make sure that you've got your account structure set correctly so that you don't lose your performance when you go to start rebuilding your spend and your performance again. And then finally, the reason for why you need a well thought out set out account structure in your Google Ads account is so that you can effectively scale and grow your brand. And we want to make sure that we're doing this in a safe and also a sustainable way. Because the power of Google Ads is that your monthly budget is actually irrelevant when you're confident in the results that your Google Ads campaigns are going to be giving your business. And that's why I've managed to count up to $200,000 in a single month. And because the brands are really comfortable and they've got a long history of knowing that when they increase their spend to those levels that the results continue or increase. So even Though you may only be running a couple of hundred dollars a month or even a thousand dollars a month at the moment, you do need to think about this account structure so that when you do start to see that month on month, quarter on quarter, year on year of success and you're ready to start scaling your brand new, you want to make sure that your campaign is set up correctly so that you can actually build it in a strong way without having to completely restructure your account. And what I'm going to do right now is something that I've actually never done before on YouTube and that is I'm going to share a little sneak peek of my upcoming course which is called Sell More with Google. And this is a course which I'm hugely excited about because over the last six or eight months I've been putting a lot of time and effort and planning and planning out the content and also testing the different strategies across different niches to make sure that this is the most up to date strategies which is going to be working for your business in 2022 and leading into 2023. And as we speak right now at the time of releasing this video on YouTube, I'm just recording the last couple of sessions and this course will be launching in the next couple of weeks. Now if you would like to stay up to date with that course if you and pre register and by pre registering you'll be receiving access to a special pre sale discounted price where I'll also be adding in some extra bonuses and inclusions that won't be available when we go to the full launch. And if you'd like to pre register now all you need to do is just to follow that link in the description below. And what I'm going to be showing you is I'm going to be taking you through the account structure that I use for small and large e commerce brands that has been seeing amazing results. So let's get straight into it. So what I want to be taking you through is I want to be taking you through the account structure that you need to be using for e commerce brands and I'm going to be breaking this down into the different types of campaigns that you need to be using and how you need to be using them. And also above that is I'm going to be going through the concept of firstly you need to separate your campaigns into your always on campaigns and and then secondly your sale campaigns and firstly I want to focus on these always on campaigns and when it comes to search for your search campaigns you want to be setting up some search campaigns that are targeting brand and competitor searches. Now you can have these separated, so sometimes people may like to have these together, but generally I'll put them into two separate search campaigns. And what I'm looking at here is I'm looking at targeting impression share, especially for your brand, where if you've got any sort of brand awareness, you will be getting high conversion rates. And the reason for why this is important, especially if you're on a desktop search, is that if those shopping ads appear to the right and not above the search results, it's very, very easy for other competitors to bid on your name and push your number one organic linking to below that first fold. So people might not even see your organic linking because all of the search ads are there. So that's the first thing that we do. And the reason for why I use target impression share as opposed to a smart bidding is because we know if the brand that's going to convert really high and we're running a bit of a defensive strategy there, making sure that other competitors or resellers don't move in on our direct sales. And then if we're doing a competitor campaign, we already know that we're going to be up against it when it comes to conversion rates. So that's one a little bit of an offensive strategy where we're trying to take some market share where possible. The other benefit of separating those out into two separate campaigns is that obviously for their competitor campaign, you're going to be depending on your client and how aggressive they want to be, or if you're running the campaign for your own business, depending on how aggressive you personally want to be and how much you're willing to pay for those competitive conversions. And then I also will run another search campaign which will be dynamic campaigns, but I use this to target sales pages. So if you've got a group of products like an end of season run or last season stock or end of line, I'll set that dynamic campaign to only be targeting that main sales landing page. So I won't do it by category, I'll do it by that 50% off or 30% off or whatever the percentage sale that you're running for that campaign now when it comes to your shopping campaign. So one thing I do want to say straight away with my shopping campaign and my performance max campaign, the strategy which I'm finding the most success with at the moment is to set up two types of shopping campaigns. The first one is a catch all campaign, but we do have to make sure that we're not targeting any individual products or product categories that are also targeted in the Performance Max campaigns. And this is going to make sense very, very soon because what we do is we add product segmentation to this catch all campaign. So it's not just all one big group. We're adding in our different product categories. So like our T shirts, our, our swimwear, our pants, our jeans, dresses, whatever products you were selling. And then when you get any high performing product categories, you then move them over to an individual product based Performance Max campaign. And what this does is that this means if you've got any new products or product launches, they automatically go into shopping and then when they start to perform, you can move them over to your Performance Max. Other businesses as well would break this a little bit differently is that they may have some tier one and tier two category products. So they only use Performance Max for their tier one products and then they use their shopping campaign for all of those little products, sometimes like accessories or just your products, which are never going to be your core selling products. And then we also run a targeted shopping campaign focused on cart abandoners and, and similar audiences. So this is a remarketing and then a bit of an outreach campaign. But we do set this as a priority feed in the campaign settings. And what that does is that that then means if there is a little bit of crossover between shopping and Performance Max, these are the ones which are going to be shown. Then when it gets to Performance Max, we're focusing on individual product category campaigns. But here's what I want to focus on with asset groups based on subcategory products. Now I released a video on this last week which I will also link at the end of this where I discussed at length how you should be creating your Performance Max campaigns with asset groups that are based on products, not on audiences. I won't go into my reasoning here because we've got that link in the video at the end of this one. And the reason for that is so that we can create those asset groups with targeted ad copy and targeted images. So.