Paid Case Study: Google Shopping for Sporting Goods

Our first course of action was to evaluate the market landscape for their products on both Google Shopping, as well as Text ads through the Google/Bing Search Network. Since the client is a reseller, we needed to understand how our pricing, shopping offering, etc. aligned to the competition and whether we could offer a competitive advantage for our client’s product lines.

Deviating from their single product line offering and hoping to expand their reach, we also took a deep dive into the profitability of their product lines to identify those that offered us the best potential profit margin and set a priority of what we should go live with first.

While the client was interested in expanding spend if the revenue/profit was there, we needed to be strategic about what product lines we pushed live at what times. This is from a seasonality standpoint, as well as an inventory standpoint, and lastly from a competitive advantage standpoint.

We launched slowly, with some of their low volume largest ticket items, which felt moderate competitive pressure, but offered a strong profit margin, in order to reinvest the profits into expanding the campaign into less profitable, but higher volume product lines.

After completing the initial shopping feed optimization efforts, the campaign began to showcase revenue growth, but more importantly, began to turn a profit. Feeling the impact of this profit, our client expanded their spend and we were able to expand into adjacent product lines.

After three months in which we were slowly increasing the spend and expanding the campaign, we were successful in lowering their cost per transaction, increasing their conversion rate, increasing their revenue, but more importantly, dramatically increasing their profit.

A short 4 months into the campaign, we turned a $199 cost per acquisition into a $31 cost per acquisition, all while increasing their spend 5X. This equates into a 172% increase in conversion rate, and a 1,204% increase in revenue from their Search Engine Marketing efforts.

Relative to profitability, WTM Digital was successfully able to turn a $1,300 loss in the first month of the campaign (inheriting much of their old campaign), into a $43k profit.