We Blew Up This Business With This Google Ads Strategy (Most Will Never Learn This)

It's like, wow, look at our Roas. And it's like, actually, let's, like, let's get under the hood and let's see what it's actually doing. Oh, did you know that 70% of sales were repeat customers? No, you didn't, right? Well, this is why your Roas looks really good in your Performance Max campaign in your Google Ads account. But you're back in numbers. You're slowly dying. You're slowly getting decreasing new customers each month.

And a big reason we want to do the standard shopping like Austin really went into at the beginning of the video, is we want to grow past that plateau. We don't want to just keep soaking up returning customers.

Okay. I have Joey, who is a senior strategist here at Grow My Ads. Joey's worked with us now for many years, and he does happen to be my little brother unfortunately as well. But, you know, he is a very good strategist with ads. And Joey's got this really cool case study where it's an e commerce business. Obviously, we can't tell you the name of the company because it is a client, so we have to keep it confidential. But if you've watched any of my recent YouTube videos over the last couple months, you'll know we've been testing a lot of what's called the feeder strategy, and that was coined by this wizard character named John Moran. Many of you will know who John Moran is, if not just Google his name. You'll find him. But in essence, what you're doing is steering away from Performance Max if you've plateaued it and you're moving back into aggressively scaling on Standard shopping. And the reason we do that is because we have found that Performance Max is great. Usually in the beginning, it's great with smaller accounts to get them growing, but eventually you kind of plateau. And so we have, you know, we've audited hundreds of companies just this year alone. We've, you know, we work with lots of clients here. I think we have over 100 here at GROW My Ads. And we have found that as you start getting to certain spend levels, it's going to vary depending on the client and industry and goals and everything else. But we have found that those that have, like, overinvested a Performance Max have now really struggled to scale. And what they're finding is new customer acquisition is decreasing on the back end and Performance Max for a lot. After investigating further, what we have found is it. It does seem to scoop up a lot of repeat purchases. If you're In a business that gets a lot of repeat purchases. So I'm not kidding. We have found performance max campaigns that were more than 50% of repeat customers coming back to order. So that's not what you want. Right. So you take those numbers out and you look at your new customer acquisition there and it's very small then and it does seem to rabbit hole warm traffic. What is warm traffic? Warm traffic is going to be people have been on the website, they've viewed products, they've you know, been on the site for two minutes plus whatever, maybe hit the checkout. Google knows that, right? Well, how do we get more of high intent new customers? We have found it's predominantly through pushing back more on standard shopping and standard search and, and and make making sure brand's not a part of that. So on the YouTube channel I've already done several case studies, I've talked about this framework. Some of those videos I'll have in the description below if you want, if you, if you're struggling like what is feeder strategy and how do you. I, I've got some videos on that. This video is a quick case study. I wanted Joey to hop on and share what he did. This client came to us this year predominantly performance max campaigns for the most part plateaued. This again this is a story we've heard many, many times from e commerce businesses this year and Joey has reworked them into more of this feeder strategy and sales have absolutely increased. Not just sales but new customer strength sales, new customer orders are have increased. So Joey, thanks for hopping on with me and yeah, I'll let you kind of take over and share your, your case study here.

Yeah, so just like Austin was saying, this was basically an account that was only doing pmax. They weren't doing any standard shopping. They came to us back really early this, this last year and they had a lot of structural problems in the account. So that was like one of our main focuses of cleanup when we looked back into the past at their PMaxes. Just want to go through this too. For people that don't know it, if you have lots and lots and lots of different asset groups, it's probably hurting you more than helping. Google doesn't necessarily actually pick the best performing asset group to just run budget towards what ends up happening if you create lots and lots of asset groups like this is, Google kind of just divides up the spend evenly a lot of the times and what you end up getting is just a lot of split traffic but it's not optimizing towards the best performing products at that point. So their products were pretty straightforward. So we kind of condensed it down into these two main categories.

Your screen is not being shared. Can you share that?

Yeah, sorry about that. So in this client you can see a lot of spend is going into these categories because we're actually looking at the entire year now. But historically they had spend through a lot of different categories. And what I did when I first came in here was said, okay, most of these are overlapping. We can condense this down to just a couple asset groups at most because we do want specific images to distinguish the different product categories. But if we only have like one or two main product categories, we don't want 20 asset groups. So we condensed all of that down. We did the same thing and their smaller parts campaigns, their accessories, and we instead of having just all these different accessory categories, just condensed into kind of a catch all. And realistically we didn't need all of these asset groups because it was just going to like divide the spend up too much. It wasn't going to help us optimize towards our best products. So I had them create their PMAX campaigns down to just two PMAXes, their main parts campaign and their accessories campaign. Essentially from there we saw that it was kind of spreading out their spend into search and a lot of other things that weren't just pmax. And we wanted to scale up. So we started them with a standard shopping campaign. And this is where you can see back in April, May, we started dropping off their performance max. And we've continued that and we've kept just performance max really low. And then if we take a look at their standard shopping campaigns throughout the year here, You can see that we've really blown up standard shopping spin. And the roas continued to do really well. Their goal was to get above a 4. When we first visited this account back in the early part of the year, like in the spring, their ad account was only getting the low 3. So it was 3.55 back in March. Back in February it was probably even lower than that, around 3.55. But we've gotten them over a 4x now by killing off PMAX and not really killing it off, we still run it, but scaling up standard shopping. And to give you some perspective on why scaling standard shopping works so much better, if we look at the last 30 days here and we take a look at one of those pmax campaigns that used to be like one of their top campaigns, they've spent in the last 30 days here, $6,000. But when we go into their actual spend. For the last 30 days on shopping products, it spent $691. So we know that only 10% of this is really going into shopping. This is what we see time and time again. These campaigns and pmax convert over to just being basically search campaigns. And we're okay with that.

I mean I or display remarketing for.

Sure and display remarketing. YouTube, yes, Gmail, some of those other channels as well. But in this case mostly search. And we're okay like with that. We're sculpting out the negatives now that pmax allows us to sculpt those negatives. But the historical performance has gone up so much with standard shopping. I really enjoy it much more. It kind of reminds me of the old smart shopping. Now you can run it on troas. It performs great. It's 100 shopping. You know what you're going to get out of scales past these plateaus that pmax runs into. And then when you look at the back end on these businesses, this is new customer growth that we've seen since the early spring.

It's a good little chart. But hold on, go back into the account. Show me from the time you started this restructuring strategy. I want to see what in app looks like. And by the way, e commerce business owners or whomever is watching this, you'll hear a lot of times I actually don't like talking too much about like roas with clients. If you're E commerce a lot of times we're going to push you into it. We want your back end numbers, we want to know what can you afford to acquire a new customer. That's ultimately the goal. How many more new customers can we help you get and at what math are you able to do that at your current state in your business? Right. And so if you have a high LTV and you know that and you're in, you know, you have cash flow to be able to operate at break even or even some, some of our clients will lose on the front end to, you know, acquire especially like supplement businesses, things like that. They know, hey yeah, I'm going to get 10 more purchases this year out of most first time new customers. So we'll Pay, you know, $100 for someone to buy our $40 supplement, whatever it may be.

Right.

But that's what I really care about. I don't really care about roas now. It's good though for these case studies to show in app metrics even improving too. And then proving, by the way, we didn't just increase roas because anyone can go increase roas. You just basically spend more money on your, you know, repeat customers and not drive any more new customers or spend more money on brand. What we care about is the new customer acquisition growth. So in app is good to show in these case studies as like hey, actually even in app looks very healthy. And so we were just reporting on that this is success. But we don't just report on that. Look at the back end new orders that have increased since the time of this. So what are we looking at here? It's June through August. So this is like good 3 months of data of only running this new structure compared to March through May, correct?

Yeah. And so like we've had this structure in since like we started it in April and it really kicked off in May. So you know, there's a little bit of previous data and scaling there as well. But if you just look at from June to August, we've still been continuing to scale. We're up 18% in spend during this last three months comparatively to the three months before that. Our cost per acquisition is down, our revenue is up 26 and a half percent. Our conversions are up almost 80%.

So and is that like an AOV decrease or something? That's quite high of conversions compared to so like sales went up essentially 80% and then revenue didn't follow it. So like some of lower end products are being sold.

Well some of that's actually because we are starting to integrate like offline tracking, conversions and calls and other things. So you're going to probably see that go up a little bit more. That's a good point to point out but if we're looking at strictly revenue growth and sales growth, yeah, 18% spend growth for the last three months, 26% ROAS. And as we all by the way.

Sorry to interject Joey, but this some people, you know, some real Google Ad veteran nerds will be like, okay, wow, you spent 18% more and you got 26% more. This is on an account. I mean if you look it's, it's, that's how much was spent there. Like what's the total dollar amount? 150,000.

Right.

So this is not just some small spender. They spend a decent amount. This was a company that came to us because they couldn't grow. They, they were plateaued. They was a bunch of performance max. Right. So even if they tried to go spend 20% more, they were getting diminishing returns, they weren't getting growth at all. So we were able to restructure and pull back control with levers to be able to actually spend more that resulted in, in more conversions. And so yes. Is this some insane, you know, number of growth? No, but this is, this is actually a breakthrough for this company. Now if you want some insane numbers, I've already done a video on that. We've, we've. And then they're a smaller spender. They, I think they're like 10, 12K a month. We literally have doubled their sales with this specific strategy that we can't, we're not going to come into a company that's spending, you know, 50, 100k a month and probably double sales. But the fact that they were able to be plateaued and like struggling for new customer acquisition growth and seen they will happily continue to spend more money if they keep getting the new customer growth that they're getting on the back end for the math for, for where they're at today with their spend and what they're able to acquire a new customer for. But this is a company that literally couldn't spend 18% more and get positive growth out of it. They got diminishing returns. They were at that plateau stage due to overinvestment in PMAX campaigns at that time. So this is fantastic for a company that was already spending basically $50,000 per month and have they've been plateaued for, you know, the last year or whatever.

Yeah. And actually a lot of, a lot of the growth really occurred kind of like in the beginning of ramp up. We've, we've been continuing to grow, but something to keep in mind is I'm cutting back their PMAX as we grow this too. So you can see we've cut 70% back on that main PMAX campaign. So we're still getting 18 growth while trying to transition this budget over to standard shopping as well.

Right, you can. And, and, and this is the other video I've done or a couple videos on some of this. You know, some. In some cases the spend on pmax was the same or it decreases like in this case. And then actually the revenue generated from pmax is, is very healthy. Still stays the same or even goes up in most cases. Let's go. Can you do Total account? Go to Total account. Drop that down. And I want to see so performance max. And there was, was there tracking? I know there had to be some tracking fixes with them. Was there any, is there any of this bad data that would be in.

No, no, no. This would be all good, healthy data.

Cool. So PMAX you spent 64% less on PMAX and generated then more revenue by being able to invest more in standard shopping. Okay, so the structure that you took place, you. So again people predominantly pmax, Joey takes over, Joey starts restructuring them over into more shopping. How did you do that transition and what does the bid strategies and structure look like right now?

Yeah, great question. And actually I think that's a really good thing to start off with asking about bid strategies on this too. So I actually went pretty aggressive with it on the decrease because once we really started seeing like, hey, this is like only 10% shopping, it's pretty much lying to us on like how much we think we're getting into shopping, I just really started shifting it over into the standard shopping. The other part with this is if we go into the standard shopping campaigns from that time period, like if we look back from like April to now, like when we've scaled that up, I don't just ramp it through the roof instantly. I start off with something casual. Like for them it was $100 a day because their, their main PMAX was spending like $800 a day. So I'm not going to just ramp it to 800 instantly. I started off as 100 for a couple of weeks and then I'll bump it and then I'll bump it 50 to $100 every week or so. And I keep doing that as long as my performance is there with my roas and I keep adjusting my goal. Now something to note is if you've done smart bidding, we all know this, you typically want 30 conversions within that 30 day period. In order to start smart bidding successfully, it needs some sort of data pool to go off of to understand what average it can look for. You can't just give a TCPA or T roas goal normally to a brand new campaign because it doesn't even know what it can get yet. Standard shopping is kind of an anomaly with this. It's the only campaign that I've been able to flip on T roas right out the gate and it does fine.

Well, yes, especially if you're, you're moving products that have already been running on the shopping network that do well. So yeah, that is, I mean, absolutely, you can just start with T roas out of the gate. Look, even search campaigns that I'm taking that historically have done well and maybe I'm doing a restructure, I can start off with smart bidding usually. Now what's weird on smaller accounts is what I'm finding. Google won't even Let you on some campaigns start with a smart bid strategy because it will say there's not enough conversions. You, you can't even force it into it, you can't hit save. So sometimes they won't allow you bigger accounts. I haven't ran into that because I think there's enough historical account data. But yeah, any of the feeder strategies I've ran, I go straight into shopping T row as bid strategy. But like Joey, I've stair stepped it up. I don't just go blast, you know, a bunch of spin to it right away. Usually I start small. So if I'm spending, you know, a few hundred dollars per day on pmax or a thousand dollars per day, depending on the client size, that I may, you know, I may be like 10, 20% that I'm starting off on my daily, then I'm ramping that up. But I am starting with T row as usually. And the T roas is always got to be lower than what performance max is for this to actually work.

Yep, exactly. So, like if, if I had my pmax set to 450%, I would set this to like 420 and I would make sure that it's lower so that it has the more aggressive bid because I'm asking for a lower return. And that ensures that it gets ad rank priority, basically because we all know that the more aggressive you bid, it bumps your ad rank. So this pretty much ensures that standard shopping is going to get the preference and the auction bidding by having the more aggressive bid. Now, with the standard shopping campaign scaling up, we did it over time and yeah, we've seen performance increase over time as we've scaled back the performance max and into standard shopping. And a big reason we want to do the standard shopping like Austin really went into at the beginning of the video, is we want to grow past that plateau. We don't want to just keep soaking up returning customers. And we can verify that this strategy has really worked because if we look from kind of the beginning of the year where we really start into us until now, we've had very good new customer growth.

Yeah. Take out, take out the beginning of September. That big drop off is just due to the fact that we're just in the start of September here. So at the end you see how.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. So we're in the very start of September. So I. I can't probably. Let's do to 08.31 and then this is what it would look like.

Yeah, that's a better. Oh, it still wanted to push you into it's just a weekly. That's fine, that's fine. That's just me being a marketer. Want to show good graphs always. But yeah, we get the picture. Yeah you have to hit the, the weeklies on that. But yeah, I mean listen, this is a, this is a real client here at grow my ads. We know what they're obviously we have their back end data here with Shopify. They're happy. Right Joey?

Like here's the thing is that I also wanted to show and is if you look at even a year today and we compare that to the previous year, they're up 100%. Like we've been scaling 96%. Yeah, yeah.

And that real. I mean the new customer order growth is you can follow it from the time you started this strategy, it started really taking off. This is not a seasonal business. Maybe a little. But not like this isn't like oh sales 10x for them during the summer months or something like that.

No, they're a little bit slower than winter which is normal for most businesses. But from, from spring to fall they've been like super consistent. So and we've just only been seeing growth. I haven't seen like a big seasonal swing or anything like that.

Yeah, I just always make sure to call that out because people who watch this, you know again we can't tell you who this company is but yeah, you know I always hey, this isn't just some seasonal swing that we got a beautiful uptick and now we're going to try to show you a graph.

The only seasonal that's going to probably happen is once it really starts hitting into the winter time, we'll decrease down our budgets. That as you can see like even when we did January and the earlier months this year we've had consistent growth in the colder months too.

Yeah, excellent.

That's it.

So listen, I, I mean you've got to do this correctly, right? But you know, if you're an E commerce business or you are an agency freelancer or work within an E commerce business and you have felt this plateau that many E commerce businesses have, start testing this strategy and if you, you know, if you're an E commerce business and you're like I, I need help on doing this, then there's a link below in the description of this video and we do free audits. That's if you qualify. But it takes like two minutes to fill a form out and you'll know if you qualify or not. Our team here at Joey will even do some of them. They'll we audit your account. We literally look at hey Ken, what's your goals, where you at, what's your struggles? And here's what we would do if we were you guys, right? So it's a practical audit. It's not some just you know, script or software that we plug this your account into and give you like this score. No, it's like go do these things or we think you should be doing these things. And then in many cases we try to roadmap it out for you too. This is what like the next three months could look like. That is free and it's practical. You can take it to your team, your agency. We really don't care at that point. Now a lot of companies will hire us after that. But go get that audit. It's like it's completely free if you qualify and we can help you figure out if this strategy is right for you at this time. In some cases we say hey performance max is doing well, it's growing for you. You haven't plateaued. Keep going. And here's what we would recommend on how to do that. We don't always just jump to this but if you are an E commerce business and you have been plateaued, this is a strategy that has been working now, not always. I'm very upfront with that. I've had a few failures and I've talked to some people like I've tried this and I didn't see it work for me. Yes, it's not 100% magic trick but we have now seen case study after case study on clients that were in this situation that we've been able to get them out of it and start increasing new customers by driving back into standard non brand search, standard non brand shopping. And in most cases for E commerce, non brand shopping is going to be the real lever that you can pull to get that high intent traffic from. I was starting creating new customer acquisition.

What's that? Yeah, I was super skeptical about this too. I rolled this out very slowly over the last year with my clients. I didn't really like standard shopping and then we knew about the update that was going to make it viable now that they were preferencing it based on ad rank and not just shutting it off completely. If PMAX was running, that was the magic trick, right? That was it. And to be honest, like I said, I've really felt like standard shopping almost feels like the old smart shopping. Yeah, it feels better. Feels way better than it what it used to be like even two years ago.

So it's good, it's good. And pmax, I think, I think Google really, they really played a trick with pmax. It was actually, it's quite. Again, I don't poo on pmax because like a lot of businesses, they can utilize pmax and it gets them to the next level. It's just when they hit this level, they plateau. They can't go beyond that the way it's engineered.

Right.

The problem with PMAX is a, it's still a black box. It hammers warm audiences from what we can find. And I mean I have provable data on that.

Right.

And then at a certain point you can't do anything like how here at grow my ads, how many e commerce clients did we have where we were so frustrated? Because we're like, I don't what can we do to move the needle here? Like it's budget or bids and then we, you know, we structure. We've, we did all this sophisticated segmentation of product performers and things like that. But when you're dealing with performance max, it just, at a certain point it does plateau out. And Google, I think tricked. Maybe not on purpose. Probably on purpose even. I know you're repping a Google T shirt today, but I listen, man, they, they're, they're, they're there to continue to make infinite growth of money for their shareholders. Just listen to their quarterly earnings report. And I think, you know, it's like, hey, everyone loves Roaz. We're going to come up with this campaign that's like gonna bring you a nice roas and everyone's gonna feel really happy when they look at that campaign. It's like, wow, look at our Roas. And it's like, actually, let's like, let's get under the hood and let's see what it's actually doing. Oh, did you know that 70% of sales were repeat customers? No, you didn't, right? Well, this is why your Roas looks really good in your Performance Max campaign in your Google Ads account. But you're back in numbers. You're slowly dying. You're slowly decreasing new customers each month. That is not growth of a company. That's a slow spiral of death. And who cares then what Google showing you inside the the account. Who cares about that fancy 5x roas you're getting, by the way? Tell me another channel. You're going to get a 500% return on cold new traffic. You're not, it's not how that, it's not how marketing works for.

That's why I Wanted to show that the back end growth too. It's because it's like hey Google, all that matters. All that matters. It looks great in platform but the the business's bank accounts up 96 year.

Over year and this client knows you're not pulling something over them. It's not who it's not wow, look what Google's showing. No, it's like this is your I, I can't fake this. This is your Shopify account, this is your new customer data, this is your repeat customer data. This is what we're seeing on the back end and this is how we're doing translating that to the strategy on the front end of new customer acquisition within your Google Ads account and obviously a very happy client that's continuing to grow and I hope we can keep that growth going for them. So just to recap, lots of pmax Joey stepped in, really started going into the feeder strategy around May pushed heavier on shopping campaigns. Huge. You saw that decrease of spend on performance Max, we just got away. We didn't get rid of P Max vmax turned more into a remarketing campaign again there will be more videos in the description below that talk about the setup of feeder strategy. If you want to go into the nerdy weeds of how this behaves and is engineered but just know it was a bigger push into standard shopping away from pmax keeping PMAX on but at a higher trust to mainly remarket the warm traffic that we're now generating from standard shopping campaign and that's where we're aggressively spending. He also consolidated the asset groups within the PMAX campaigns. They were running way too many, didn't make any sense so there was some consolidation effort. He is running full assets. Sometimes we do run this with just feed only. We test that in this case full assets is working wonderfully. So he has a full asset group on and he's continued to push that over the last three months and stair stepping it, not just blasting it. Right. And the growth speaks for itself on the back end of new customer orders that he showed within that Shopify account. Joey, any any other last words or tips you want to throw into this before we finish?

Just that I. I really think that if you already have a PMAX going and you want to start this, you start on troas. I've tried the manual CPC out the gate and max clicks and it it's a lot worse to start that direction than if you can get the T roas to start out the gate. So I would recommend that and then like I showed kind of in the video. I stair stepped it. So I did not just blast this up to 800 a day. Originally I started it out at like 10, 20% of what my actual PMAX was. And then I as I wanted to grow this campaign 50 bucks, I took 50 from my PMAX and I shifted it over. So I'm not necessarily just inflating this client's budget up to. I was really trying to make sure that the spending that we did grow was because of the results and not just of me like ramping up a standard shopping campaign. I really did pull down their PMAX campaign by like 80% to fund this and just get it into a better network of results.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, thanks Joey again. If you're an E commerce business, go get that audit. If you qualify links in the description below. If you want more access to us, we have a group called PPC Copilot. That is our training group. We do weekly Q&As in there, we'll do calls, we have training videos and courses. And guess what? Joey is a coach inside of that group. So not only am I active in there, but Joey's in there answering questions and giving feedback to people. And so lots of, lots of incredible stuff there. It's very affordable. I think right now it's at like 100 bucks a month with a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you want to hop in and pick the brains of nerds like Joey or myself on any of this, then go join PPC Co Pilot. There will be a link to that group in the description below. And if not, no worries. I will see you guys on the next video.