Microscope Central is a leading online retailer of high-end microscopes and microscope accessories. Their parent company, I. Miller Microscopes, has served the educational, clinical, and industrial microscope markets for over 80 years. In 2014, Microscope Central was launched as an e-commerce extension of I. Miller and has grown to become one of the top microscope providers in the industry.

The client had been managing their PPC advertising in-house since launching in 2014. Though results were solid and the campaigns were consistently profitable, management felt like performance had plateaued. Its at that point that they sought out the expertise of an agency to help fuel their growth.

Goals

• Increase ROAS by 50% in the first three months
• Refine shopping campaigns to bring them to the same level of profitability as search
• Scale up overall sales volume profitably

• Conversion tracking was inaccurate, making historical data unreliable for optimization
• Search campaigns were poorly structured and needed a complete rebuild
• Competitive market with many competitors outspending the client by a wide margin
• Very basic shopping campaign set up that needed a strategic overhaul

After cleaning up some of the low-hanging fruit in the account, our first major initiative was to rebuild the search campaigns. The current campaigns were poorly organized, utilized inefficient bidding strategies, and were missing many valuable product-based keywords. We started by reviewing their entire product catalog to find valuable product keywords we could add to our search campaigns. We then incorporated these new products using a SKAG (Single Keyword Ad Group) structure to keep all ad groups tightly themed.

Our next big project was developing a winning Google Shopping strategy. The account had just one very basic Smart Shopping campaign when we took over. We broke their feed out into multiple campaigns based on intent using our Waterfall Technique. Through a combination of product exclusions, varied bids and negative keywords we were able to achieve clean segmentation fairly quickly.

We love taking on accounts that are bursting at the seams with potential, and Microscope Central was just that. After tackling a few quick wins we were able to instantly move the needle on all key metrics. Within the first month, we had completely rebuilt their Google Ads account and thats when performance really started to take off. By the 60-day mark we had already increased ROAS by almost 100%, and within 90 days that number rose to 140%.

Now that the account has a solid foundation we have begun to scale up these results by increasing overall sales volume. Just four months in we have increased overall sales volume by 45% and theres still plenty of room for growth!