Jani KahukiwaOur amazing team duo, Mel and Onkar, take us through their strategy for turning a dropshipping business into a Google Ads success story.
Table of Contents
The Starting Point
Our Senior Client Manager, Melissa Nodding, and brilliant Strategist, Onkar Indalkar, collaborated with this family-owned company and turned its Google Ads account into a real money-making business. Just like the title says, they were struggling to make $30,000 per month. A year later, here they are now making six figures.
To set the scene, our client had a very effective Smart Shopping campaign in place. Being a dropshipping company with thousands of products, this was the perfect strategy for an unlimited number of items.
However, in October of last year, Google Ads started upgrading to Performance Max (PMax) with devastating results for this particular client. And that is where Onkar and Mel stepped in to work out the best solution for them. The effort did not come exclusively from Solutions 8, though. The client demonstrated determination and attention to detail in making their company the best it could be.
For the first eight months, there was a struggle to get this client back on track. Performance was initially poor in their Shopify store, and we knew we had to experiment with many different strategies to see how we could make up ground.
There were a lot of structures to try out to get the same ROAS the client was originally hitting while using a Smart Shopping campaign. That’s the advantage of Smart Shopping campaigns; they can easily find the best products and scale only those.
So while we were spending $1,000 on 10 profitable products in Smart Shopping, PMax with an ad spend of $1,500 did not keep that extra money in the top 10 best-selling products but put the additional $500 toward testing other products.
That’s when our figures went down. And we had to come up with some alternative solutions.
Trying Different Strategies
We started with a straightforward PMax campaign with multiple asset groups, but it didn’t yield the results our client deserved. It started well enough but after a certain point, we couldn’t scale further.
One of the main issues with an account like this is its low average order value (AOV). It’s always a struggle to get high ROAS, solid profitability, and good conversions with an average AOV of $50.
We tried segmentation which is one campaign for one product. We implemented a second strategy simultaneously, which was the stairstep method, the original method we were using with Smart Shopping.
The key here was finding some well-performing categories and giving them each their campaign. We then gave one campaign to the rest of the underperforming categories and applied the stairstep method again, increasing tROAS and ad spend after seven days.
A weekly increase of 20% in ad spend helped the algorithm learn steadily. Any more than that meant poor performance. We scaled slowly over about four months until we saw positive results with our dropshipping client.
Google Ads works on search volume. It’s not like Meta (Facebook) Ads where you can spend 10X the budget in a day and scale by 10X. No. Google will not allow you to scale a campaign above search volume. There is only so much search volume available in the market, and Google will assign you a percentage of that. As a result, there are limitations.
But once we’d scaled, ROAS looked good and we were set. Success in the United States gave us the go-ahead to move into the Canadian market. After that, we moved on to other countries like Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Mel and Onkar are planning to test the EU market shortly.
Hypersegmentation
There was a moment when Onkar had to be ruthless with products. This particular client has 16,000 products and a product-heavy business does not usually get good results within a PMax campaign. PMax will throw money on any product regardless of its profitability. Behind the scenes, Onkar had to put those items that weren’t likely to perform on the back burner. This brought us to focus on the products that were working: hypersegmentation, in other words.
To decide which products and categories to discard, we created reports that showed us the product types that were getting the best results. The sub-category that worked best got segmented out. Conditional formatting allowed us to see the data more clearly. This is how we localized the ROAS of best-performing products. It also helped us identify the products with the best click-through rate (CTR).
Check Shopify Product Data
While it is imperative to look at Google Ads data, it is worth mentioning that the product data in Shopify is equally important. Because the client has so many products, Google might not spend a lot on products that otherwise do well in the client’s Shopify store. It is important to review and cross-check product performance.
Furthermore, it is a great idea to talk with the client directly to ascertain which products have good profit margins. Collaborating closely with the client can bring miraculous results.
Our dropshipping client did amazing things on their end. They were very proactive, digging through all of the data, including CTR and different metrics in Shopify to see that their products were working well. Since the client was hands-on, taking pictures of each product and testing them, they were a valuable part of the improvement process.
The company set itself apart from other dropshippers thanks to the effort made with lifestyle images of the products personally selected. When it came to feedback from clients, they were exceptionally attentive to any comments and suggestions. Problems with their products got the best in after-sales customer care. The team went above and beyond to resolve issues. Collaboration of this kind is invaluable in helping any company get results.
Social Media, Creatives, And Other Strategies
Other factors such as an in-house team for multiple social media platforms were great in giving this client the success they deserve. The team had large amounts of content, whether that be on TikTok, Instagram, videos, and images.
The client tested product titles and changed them based on the findings. Solutions 8 took an extra step and had a specialist go over the client’s product feed in detail, and any problems were addressed and improved upon immediately. Unlike so many dropshipping businesses, this one has an ongoing charity program that gives back. All these small things added up to big results.
The combination of the work done at Solutions 8 coupled with a highly driven and motivated client can bring a level of success that everybody wants but not everybody can have unless they are willing to put in the work.
This client is such a great example of how improving the entire business can truly give incredible results. It is an enormous pleasure to work with this company.
