This Google Ads Strategy Got Him 60% More Customers In His WORST Season

You know, working with you guys for the first time ever, like, you know, in all the years we've been in business, in August, our sales were higher than July, which has never happened before. So it was interesting working with you guys because many times when you're looking at Google Ads approaches, like there's lots of best practices that you follow and then everyone really focuses on roas. The thing that I got really out of working with your team was looking at it holistically, right? Looking like all of your media span, all of your ad spend and saying, you know, based on what you're spending across all these different channels, how does and, and what you're getting a customer for and what that customer, how much money those customers are spending, like that's what you really need to be looking at versus just what's in roas. Because Roas by itself also touch point, it's not the, the guiding light, I guess, as far as effectively running an ads campaign. So that was probably really the, probably one of the biggest things I got out of.

All right, boom. I've got Ron Henry and Ron has been working with us for the last 90 days now, I believe. And Ron owns Golf Course Lawn Store and had a real messy account when you first came came on board. And we've had some tremendous success working with you, growing your new customer, kind of understanding the back end data. And I think next year is going to be absolutely crazy for you since obviously you're a seasonal business. So Ron, I appreciate you doing this call if you, you know, just want to give like a quick little intro of yourself.

Sure, yeah. So first of all, thanks Austin for the opportunity. Yeah. So you know, I run the, the Golf Course Lawn store, which is an online e commerce retailer. We sell fertilizer, fungicides, pretty much everything you need to get an amazing lawn across the country. And in the past couple of years, what we've been trying to do is add Google Ads as an additional customer acquisition channel because we heavily rely on organic and we're just trying to diversify a little bit. So from like going just reading online, we built out a structure using Performance Max. Because Google, you know, if you get on the phone with Google, they're telling Performance Max is the end all, be all to everything. So we ended up with a structure that was probably four or five PMAX campaigns that was broken out by various product categories. And while it performed okay, we ran into issues with scaling. Like we would give each campaign more budget and it was never able to really spend it and really help grow Acquisitions. So I said, you know what, this isn't working. I need to reach out to someone and figure out like one is our structure, does it make sense? And how can we get to something that's going to be a bit better for the business both now and then going forward into the future.

And you found us on YouTube, right?

Correct? Yeah, I found your content on YouTube. I went through your audit. I think you guys do an audit, a website audit.

Yeah, if you qualify. So anyone who's watching this, if you, and if you are an E commerce business or any business running Google Ads, you should absolutely go get a free audit from us. As long as you qualify. Like if you're just starting or you spend like very little, then you won't qualify. Cause we get too many people wanting them. But you obviously qualified and yeah, so we did that free audit for you and it was practical advice, right? It's not a fluffy audit at all.

No, no, I mean I'll be honest. Like, like what I got out of the audit, I said what this is, I was able to take action on some of that as far as cleaning up targeting and the pixel and this type of things are just a lot of good hygiene for the account that was really actionable and I did that and I said, well, you know, these guys, I mean, provided quite a bit of value. I'm sure if I worked with them, even if it's only for a period of time, they'd be able to really get things on the right track and really help improve the sales velocity of the business. So yeah, the audit by itself was great, but then that parlayed into the engagement that we, which yeah, I mean.

I mean, and that audit does a lot of times if we want to work with the companies, I mean some, some companies we just don't really want to work with even though they would want to work with us through that audit process for various reasons. But you know, you were one, we saw tremendous opportunity to help. And you know, your account's not unusual to see in those audits. That's just, it gets messy. There's Google reps recommending things. This video on YouTube says this, this guy says this, this blog post says this. I saw this on LinkedIn. It's confusing, it's very noisy and you know, I try to be as like, at least with the content, as practical as possible. We spend millions and millions per month. Like we have over 100 clients. A lot of them are decent sized companies. We have not just e commerce businesses, but also legion. So we, we See it. All right. And so usually we know a game plan that's going to work. And for E Commerce, what we have found especially right now is, you know, we're doing this video on, on Halloween. Happy Halloween. By the way. I totally forgot until it's October 31st, but it's obviously no costumes today for, for me. But yeah, I mean like everyone has really invested heavy in the performance max over the last like year or two and for good reasons for many of it. And I mean you're talking to a guy who has like a performance max course out there. But.

Right.

What we have found is it really was doing a lot of like retargeting when we started really diving into it or companies would, I'm talking big, big companies will come to us and they'll just have a ton of PMAX going on and they're like Google shows that we're up and our back end numbers are down. So they're like what's going on? And it's like, how is Google saying we're up? And then, you know, and this is one of our biggest advertising channels and we're actually down on new customer acquisition or even overall sales on the back end of true, true sales. And what we have found is like, yeah, like an over investment in NpTax doesn't actually scale you at a certain point. And so there's a play with performance max, right. It's just not the play to scale and grow. And so with your account and by the way, Ron found us on YouTube. Ron has an incredible YouTube channel himself. You're killing it. What do you have like 100,000 subs or close to it?

Just under. I mean across all social media, over 100 on YouTube, just under 80,000.

Under. Okay. All right. And you've been doing it for, for many years. And yeah, you're like the, the king of lawns, right on, on YouTube. So I will have your YouTube channel linked in the description below. I'm also going to link out to your website too just in case someone needs one of your, you know, your products come this next year in spring and whatnot. So. So anyways, we get into it, right? And you know, one of the things that we worked with you on was like, all right, well we want to see back in numbers. We want to see the actual Shopify data. Since your website's on Shopify, we hooked you up with the MER Incac tracking sheet, right? And before we did anything, we started just building the foundation of. All right, here's the back end numbers. Here's what you're paying for a new customer currently. Here's what you're averaging on new customers per week. You're a very seasonal business. You have like a boom in the spring and summer and then it kind of drops. You're. We're going into the quiet period obviously now.

Sure.

And then we worked with like margins in regarding like ltv. We used by the numbers app, which is a. I thought it was cheaper than what it is now. I think it was like a hundred bucks a month. Right. That you had to add on. But by. By the numbers incredible app. All the data lives in in Shopify. Just it. This app has an incredible UI to make everything very simple. And there, you know, this isn't just me telling or us telling you what LTV is and all this, but you were able to get like very clear customer cohort analysis on top customers and loyal customers and customers that have been lapsed and need to be reactivated. And we've got then a true average ltv. Right. And then based on your margins, we were able to determine, hey, here's the maximum you should be paying for a new customer. And that became our, our guiding North Star. And so it wasn't. I, I mean, you know, it's not like we came in and said ro roused. That was like, nope, let's look at back in numbers first. And that's going to translate to what we're going to do on the Google side. And actually with you it's pretty funny, right? Because one of the first things we told you to do is shut brand off. And I think you, I forget how much you were spending. We'll call it, you know, 500,000 bucks a month or something on a brand campaign. But we looked into it and we're like no one's bidding on your name. And so based off all the data we saw, there's no one bidding on your name. Let's shut it off. Like let's. Google doesn't need any more of your money. Let's shut that off. And in most cases you shut something off like that your account results are going to dip. So in app metrics look worse. But like I said, hey, we only care about new customer, new customers per week right now and per month. And then that incac. If this drops significantly, we'll know we did something bad. We. But if this stays fine, we know we're fine. Also your true like orders true back in orders we had clarity on all of that. Guess what? Nothing changed.

Nothing happened.

It wasn't bad. So we just saved immediately, you know, 500 to $1,000 per month from shutting brand off because no one was just bidding on your brand name. Now I'm not saying anyone who's listening to this, go shut off all your brand ads. It just depends. In Ron's case, literally no one was showing up in the auction insight report. So it just didn't make sense for him to run search ads and pay Google a thousand bucks a month just for the privilege of showing an ads. That's crazy. And so that was shut off. Then we did a restructure.

Yep.

You went from five, six, whatever campaigns and we restructured you into a very simple structure. And my framework, or our framework is really only complicate things or, or go through this segmentation process when it's necessary or when it makes sense. Right. And in your case we didn't believe that was, that wasn't the case. Like so we're like, when we worked like that process, we worked through it with you before we did this, but we consolidated and we ran essentially a feeder strategy, a feedback. If you're listening to this, you're like what the heck's a feeder strategy? I have a video that I've done on what the feeder strategy is a guy named John Morand who's like a OG, sort of Google Ads wizard, real crazy character. It's kind of something he coined. But we were like let's move away from so much going into performance max and actually translate that back into none or not non brand. Little on the non brand search, but more on standard shopping. We still ran performance max but we ran it under the feeder strategy where we were actually trying to like hack it into being more of a remarketing and back channel inventory fill campaign for us. And by doing that that allowed us to really increase and be aggressive on cold new traffic. And if those people didn't convert pmax kind of, then we'll hopefully go remarket them. That's the whole concept and that restructure process for you. We were able to kind of tackle most of the restructuring phase probably within a 30 day time frame.

I feel like it was for like four weeks. Four. Four to five weeks. Yeah, yeah.

And it, that wasn't, it wasn't like okay, we're done. Right. Like that was like refoundation. And then we were also working with you as you're going into the off season. So that gets tricky because it's like you're making changes but you're also going to lose natural volume because people just aren't buying fertilizer as much as we got into, you know, fall and, but we were able to navigate that because like as we worked with you, certain products just weren't going to sell as much. And we saw that in the data and so we started pruning the campaigns as that was happening, we weren't making big significant swings. And the feeder strategy has worked wonderfully going into the off season. In fact, so wonderfully I looked up the data and we grew your new customers by 60% compared to in season. So if we had this structure that we were operating in May, I can only imagine the results that you would have then. So, you know, the fact that we grew new customers by 60% more off season compared to in season is totally crazy. And now that we're at this place, you know what your buyer frequency is, you know what your LTV is based off of the data that we analyzed. And now I know you're very excited a with the results that you've had over just a 90 day period. But next year, you know, unfortunately, November, December is your slowest time, but next year I, you know, the amount of new customers that you've acquired that you're now going to probably get multiple purchases from next year based off of all the data we have and strategies implemented, next year is going to be a fantastic year for you, I guarantee it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean it's been really good. I mean the coolest thing is that, you know, normally our busiest time of year, to your point, is in the spring and it's just this gradual fall down to the abyss of like no sales and unhappiness. Right. But you know, working with you guys for the first time ever, like, you know, in all the years we've been in business, in August our sales were higher than July, which has never happened before. So instead of being this constant fall off it, we flattened it out a bit and then now you get into this time of year when it's just the weather's cool and no one's buying anything. So it really fell off then. But it's, it's, it was interesting working with you guys because many times when you're looking at Google Ads approaches like there's lots of best practices that you follow and then everyone really focuses on Roas. The thing that I got really out of working with your team over the 90 day campaign was looking at it holistically, right? Looking like all of your media span, all of your ad spend and saying based on what you're spending across all these different channels and what you're getting a customer for and how much money those customers are spending, that's what you really need to be looking at versus just what's in roas. Because Roas by itself, also touchpoint, it's not the. The guiding light, I guess, as far as effectively running an ads campaign. So that was probably really the. Probably one of the biggest things I got out of this.

Yeah. I mean, it shouldn't be your North Star. And Roas is great, especially when you're smaller and you're getting going. You just need like a baseline metric to work with. The problem is, including myself, we've all been sold that ROAS is like the best metric to, to operate from. The problem is the higher the roas. Technically, you know, it's a negative thing to me because it's like, usually that's already warm traffic. The highest Roas campaign is going to be your brand name, always. Well, why is that? Because it's people who already warmed up to you, and more than half of them, more than likely are repeat customers too, that are coming through that. So unless you, you know, do certain things. But, but high Roas is like, to me, a bad sign. So when someone comes to me, they have super high Roas. I'm like, what are you trying to do here? Like, I. It's like, do you want to grow? Yeah, yeah, we want to grow and that's what we want to do. And it's like, well, then high Roas is actually a negative metric to me because, like, if you're getting an 8x, why are you not pouring into this thing? Like, this is. So tell me, is it a logistical thing, capacity thing, cash flow thing, or something going on? Because, like, if you're getting an 8x right now, this may never happen again in your life. So pour the gasoline on it.

Agreed.

But usually when you dive into the numbers with it, it's like, oh, actually you're getting 8x because more than 50% of the traffic you're driving from Google is actually just repeat customer traffic. So you're not really growing your new customers at the rate you think you are. So, oh, let's dive into what your new customer acquisition looks like. Oh, here's your. What you're paying to get a new customer. Does that number make sense for you? And that would be the ncac, right? And it's like, oh, no, that's not. It's like, okay, so forget that 8x roas or whatever you're operating at. This is the number you should be looking at. It in Google plays, you know it's, it's going to be a lot of middle funnel, bottom of the funnel. So like there's no problem with like ROAS as a guiding metric in the beginning but to truly scale, you scale with new customers then you acquire those new customers at whatever math makes sense for your business and then you get that customer to come back and buy as often as possible from you and over and over again. Right. That's how you build a big business. And it's not by acquiring new customers at the the highest roas that's just not the game. And so I, so yeah usually when I see that it's just someone who probably needs a little educated and also we've, because of marketers like me over the years, Google and everyone else, everyone was sold roas and it became this like number one metric. But the number one metric for e commerce businesses to me is new customer acquisition. How many new customers are you getting on a weekly and monthly basis? Is that growing? And are you acquiring new customers at a cost that makes sense for you and your business? And so for you we calculated that based off of what you are comfortable with as a business at where you're at today. And then also the LTV knowing on average you're, you're not getting just one purchase from your customers, they're coming back multiple times.

Right.

So are you able to operate on that? The higher your in CAC obviously the more aggressive you can be with your marketing. You know we've had periods Ron where you have ups and downs especially as we're going through the off season and, and you'll notice every time what are we doing? We're in the sheet looking at what NCAC looks like and what new customers look like. In fact you had a couple weeks there where revenue dropped and we went and looked but new customers grew so your repeat customers dropped and that was the revenue drop. But on the new customer acquisition side you were still growing. And that to me is such an eye opening moment when you see something like that and it doesn't always happen but in your case it just did because of where you're at with your business and going in the off season. But that means your advertising dollars and 90% for you right now is Google. Your advertising dollars are truly being spent in the most effective way of generating new customers because your repeat dropped and new was growing. And so we know that what we were doing is truly amplifying and growing new customer growth for you. And, and yeah, and we had some weeks where NCAT got a little too high. And so, okay, hey, we got a little too aggressive. Right. And so we eventually will cross reference NCAC to what we're seeing on roas. And over time you start to get a feel for what ROAS numbers you're hitting equates to what NCAC you're kind of getting on the back end. It may fluctuate a little bit, but you get a feel for it. It takes some time. It takes some just getting into the data. I won't say what you're operating at, but we know. And by the way, anyone who looks at Ron's account would think, wow, this is a shockingly low ROAS to operate an account at. It's not. And that's why you're able to also be aggressive now in the market and acquire all these new customers. That is absolutely going to continue to explode your business.

Right? Yeah.

The other thing I want to say about you too, which is cool just working with you. By the way, Ron's not leaving. He. We're just going to take a quick little breather and, and then we'll be back in action starting next year. But the offseason we, we handed you a nice handoff guide to monitor this thing, but we're not going to charge you for November and December here. But the cool thing about you is you, you're actually a reseller of products and you're priced higher and you're able to kill it. And Ron is a, a true testament to brand power. And your brand power comes from the fact that you're on YouTube and you've grown such a incredible following and authority there, rightfully so. But you know, I've been amazed working with you that it. You're able to like in not because most cases a business that will come to us and we see they're, they're priced higher. We won't take them on as a client if they're a reseller because a lot of e commerce businesses are nothing more than catalogs that have been uploaded to a Shopify template and they think they've got a business, right? And it's like, well listen, you're 20 higher than all your competitors. No one's gonna buy from you. And though those that do were just lazy, they just didn't go check. You know, they could buy it from the other competitor because what value prop do they have over buying from a competitor? It's, they're going to ship it to competition probably faster. And you know, all the. So you don't offer Anything that they can't. And you're more expensive than to, to, to make that happen. For the same or similar experience. For you though, you've got brand power because like most of your competition's pretty generic. Some of them are larger organizations, they sell other products not just specialized in, in lawn, but you're, you've built this brand as like you truly are the number one authority resource when it comes, you know, lawn care. And you've been able to really still convert highly while being 20% higher. I, I, I, I forget what the percent is, but you know, it varies.

From product to product. But yeah, I mean the, the big thing is, I mean we are a smaller business. I mean eventually someday we'll, you know, our pricing will be weak such that we can, we can compete bigger with the big boys. But to your point, I, I, I, we look at what we do more so from a standpoint of offering a solution and the products are part of that. So a big part of the business is also education, like helping people to get the result they want in their lawn. And I think that that is what really has allowed us to, to have prices that are a little bit higher than our competition just due to where we are in the marketplace currently and still be able to be successful. Mainly because we're just not, we're not just selling you your product and saying you good luck. It's, it's the product and the data and process that goes along with it. And I think that's, if I had to guess, that's a lot of why we've been able to see a measure of success.

Absolutely. It's incredible. It's, it's been incredible to, to see and you know, you're like a case study that I use in regards to like building authority and brand positioning because there's power behind it. If you didn't have that, you wouldn't have the business you have today or you wouldn't be able to sell as much as you do being 20% higher on some of the products that you know, we're doing quite well on. So yeah, it's been fun, you know, having the success we've had over the just last 90 days. I think next year is going to be absolutely insane. So hopefully we, we can do this one again next year when we have year over year numbers that are real crazy high. Any, any last words, anything else?

No, I would just say that anyone that's looking at like considering the investment of working with an agency, like a really good one, that it's it's completely worth it. From the sound point that you can get online, you can read a lot, you can watch YouTube videos on YouTube, but really the best campaigns, and you talk about something that's taken a lot of different courses myself on this, the best campaigns are really going to come from seeing your individual business and seeing what rules really apply to you and what rules, you know, and what doesn't apply. And that's only really going to come through the eyes of someone that's seen a lot more than what you've seen. Like they're a lot more experience than you do. So easily one of the best investments we've made in our business. So again, for anyone that's, that's, that's looking into or thinking if it's worthwhile to invest in having a pro, at least at a minimum look over their shoulder for a couple of months, absolutely worth it. Absolutely worth it. I mean, if I'd done this last year, I'd be in a much better spot than we are now. So, you know, well as promise today, right? Yeah.

Oh, I appreciate the kind words and you know, if for those that aren't in a spot to be able to hire us yet, that's why we have the, the school group as well. And I mean a lot of the things I'm talking about today with, that we've did with Ron, I'm, I'm just telling people how to do that in, in the group. And so if you're more of a DIYer or you, you know, you might not be big enough yet to afford our agency fees, then, you know, go, go check out the group. I'll have a link in the description below there and you can learn more about like how we're, we're operating and to have the success like we had with Ron and his business so. Well, Ron, look man, I appreciate you doing this. I appreciate you, you know, being so kind to hop on and talk about the success that we've had and I'm looking forward to next year, I really am because I, I, I believe you're, you're going to have like insane success. And, and based off of the numbers, I'm not like, I, like I told you, I'm not a PhD mathematician. I don't know how, I'm not, I'm not going to sit here and tell you how to forecast for next year based off what we've been able to do over the last 90 days. But from what I, you know, what we have seen in the data, the new customer acquisition that We've been able to absolutely accelerate compared to even what in season was. And the data that we now have to go into next year, knowing that all of these new customers that we just acquired, so all this growth that you just got, that's coming back to you double next year because these people are going to come back and buy on average, we know X amount of times and we know what that LTV is. And using some of the data, we don't even do email, but that some of that data that provided of lapsed customers and all these different customer segments, you know, now you've got a game plan to go into next year on how to reactivate some of those people. So I just, you know, the growth that we've seen, the data that we have, the foundations that have been built next year is going to be tremendous for you. So I'm glad to be a part of that ride with you.

Yeah, man. Should be a good problem to have. We'll see.

So cool. All right, well, look, man, I appreciate you getting on again. Go check out. If you want to have the best lawn in the neighborhood, go check out his YouTube channel. I'll have that in the description below. If not, I'll see you guys on the next video.

Thanks.