Outdoor Solar Store is an online retailer of high quality solar lighting products. The brand is owned by a parent company that sells a variety of outdoor home brands. Outdoor Solar Store experienced huge growth in 2020 when the pandemic led to a huge spike in home improvement related purchases but sales began a downward spiral in 2021 and continued into early 2022. The client came to us looking to get back on track and increase ROAS after a year of declining profits.

Goals

• Increase ROAS on Paid Search while maintaining top-line revenue.
• Scale Paid Social into a larger part of the overall digital strategy

• Because Outdoor Solar Stores products are higher quality than most of their competitors, the price point is also higher. Competing for market share against less expensive products is always a challenge in the PPC space.
• The Google Ads account structure was outdated and required significant retooling. We took over the account heading into their peak season, which meant that each major change we made to the account carried significant risk.

Our team started by completing a full audit of the account and creating a list of action items broken into four quadrants- high impact, low work, high impact, high work, low impact, low work, and low impact, high work. We started by tackling the items on the high impact, low work list. This list included things like changing the attribution model on conversion actions from last click to a position-based model to more accurately reflect the customer lifecycle. We also implemented responsive search ads into each ad group with 12 headline & 6 description options to test against the outdated expanded text ads that were previously implemented.

Once the initial clean-up of the search campaigns was complete, we started on the high-impact, high-work list. This included consolidating the ad groups within each search campaign by product category from the single keyword ad group structure that had been previously implemented.

The next step was tackling the shopping strategy. When we took over management, a standard shopping campaign was running which accounted for roughly 35% of the total ad spend. Performance had been gradually declining over the last year to a low point of a below 1x return. After seeing great performance from Performance Max campaigns with similar e-commerce clients earlier in the year, we decided to introduce Performance Max into our shopping strategy. We re-allocated 50% of the shopping campaign budget into Performance Max & implemented ample photo and video assets into each product group to ensure that Google had enough options to test.

In conjunction with building out the Performance Max campaign, we also onboarded Feedonomics- our go-to feed management partner. Our primary goal with Feedonomics support was to improve the product headlines in the shopping feed in an effort to improve CTR & ad relevance.

It was a risk to launch Performance Max during Outdoor Solar Stores peak season but the declining return from standard shopping due to changes in the Google landscape and campaign prioritization left us with few options.

Google states that it can take 6-12 weeks for Performance Max to get through the learning phase and show its full potential, so we were pleasantly surprised when the first week of performance resulted in a 5.96x return, nearly three times the ROAS of standard shopping at the time of launch. Since launch, the Performance Max campaign has continued to generate a strong ROAS and continues to take traffic away from standard shopping, which weve been moving to progressively phase out.

The new shopping campaign strategy, combined with a lift in search performance as a result of the new ads and campaign optimization, resulted in a 169% increase in Outdoor Solar Stores daily profit.