Case Study: Google Ads optimization drives 43% YOY sales growth for US-based paint manufacturer
At Marketing Works, we believe that effective advertising starts with a deep understanding of the business, its unique value propositions, and the diverse customers it serves. We dig in to understand what their customers are looking for and how they shop. Working closely with the business allows us to create highly effective Google Ads campaigns that reach and resonate with a broader audience, increasing long-term profitability for the business.
The Challenge: A US-based paint manufacturer had a strong foundation with its physical retail and online stores. They also recognized the potential for Google Ads to significantly improve their online sales. They partnered with us to optimize and scale their existing account.
The Work: We worked closely with the business to understand their full product offering and how their customers shop for each product line. We learned that:
Insight 1 - There are two kinds of sales cycles: Some customers buy the product in one go, but others first buy a sample and later come directly to the site - bypassing the ads - for a larger order. The best customers do more of the latter. This insight made us look differently at the metrics Google reported, knowing that it was underreporting and not optimizing for the true sale value.
Action: We pushed the existing PMax campaigns to seek net new traffic and prioritized increasing the volume of new customers over the value of individual conversions. We did this by excluding Brand from PMax, refraining from shifting to a Target ROAS bidding strategy, and pulling in metrics from Google Analytics and Shopify to see the full sales cycle and ad impact. We also added a new Search campaign solely to capture Brand traffic.
Result: 46% increase in monthly ad-driven conversions and 15% increase in monthly first-time purchasers.
Insight 2 - Customers shop visually: We recognized that how products are displayed in Google Shopping ads significantly impacts customer engagement throughout the entire sales cycle. Customers shopped visually - preferring to see the actual colors and textures first and then progressing to other decisions.
Action: We worked with the business to restructure how product variants are set up in Google Merchant Center and to double the catalog of products available to Google Ads. Instead of hiding away the color selection on the product page, we pulled in the color swatch as the hero image of the ads - aiming to immediately engage customers by highlighting the unique textures of the paints.
Result: Profit on ad spend increased 44% as conversion rate increased from 1.8% to 2.6% and CPC dropped from $1.17 to $0.81.
Insight 3 - Segmenting by profitability improves sales: Once we had a larger product catalog to work with, we explored different segmentation strategies to ensure the most effective use of ad spend. Creating segments would allow us to direct more budget toward the best-selling items while still maintaining visibility for the rest of the catalog.
Action: We took one product line and divided the high-performing and low-performing products into two separate ad campaigns and monitored results over a month. We focused 75% of the budget on the top 30% of the products, while 25% of the budget supported the remaining 70% of products.
Result: Account ROAS increased 50% from 2.10 to 3.15.
The Impact: Within 8 months, monthly customer count is up 91% YoY and online sales are up 43% YoY and growing.
This case study illustrates how a focus on strategic product presentation, creative ad content, and optimized budget allocation can drive significant online sales growth for a local manufacturing business using Google Ads.
Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash