In this case study, you'll learn how we increased the total revenue for this home improvement e-commerce store by 77%!
Many small and medium-sized home improvement stores face big name brands such as Home Depot, Lowes, and more, even if a PPC campaign manages to win against a big brand name, there are still several smaller stores in the home improvement industry competing for the same audience!
So, how are small businesses supposed to level the playing field? The answer is a highly-tuned and targeted pay-per-click or PPC advertising campaign.
Keep reading below to learn how we helped catapult an online home improvement store to reach more customers and increase their revenue.
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Disclaimer: The client has asked to remain anonymous. So we will not mention any names in this article.
Background of The Home Improvement E-Commerce Store Business
The business has both an online store and a physical store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They have been selling doors for saloons and cafes online since the 1980s, and became a customer of ours in March 2020.
The business had a well designed and managed website, and have been using the internet to make sales for a very long time, but they still needed help with paid advertisement. The home improvement store stated 70% of their business was generated by their e-commerce store and the remaining 30% was from foot traffic at the physical store in Pittsburgh, PA.
The customer wanted to increase revenue by reaching more potential customers and set a goal of getting 5x their ROI on paid advertisement. Furthermore, they had an additional goal that the cost of paid advertisement was not to exceed more than 20% of the total revenue brought in.
We recommended our Managed PPC Service to them to get all of the services needed in a dedicated campaign.
In-Depth Discovery & PPC Audit of The Home Improvement E-Commerce Store
Through in-depth discovery, the main challenge that was discovered is that our customer felt they HAD to be on Google using shopping ads, search ads, and display ads to compete with the "big boy" competitors like Lowe's, Home Depot, Wayfair, or Amazon.
Additionally, the problem was the home improvement online store wasn't seeing a return-on-investment (ROI) when internally running Google Ads on their own. And their budget was only a fraction of what the big name brands spent.
Every campaign starts with a comprehensive audit of the website, landing pages, and the current paid advertising campaign if the customer has one, to uncover the opportunities that are there. After the audit was completed, we discovered that the client had a high-performing Standard Campaign, delivering a high return.
See snapshot of the campaign below:
PPC Research - Identifying The Opportunities (Easy Wins) For A Home Improvement E-Commerce Store Business
Because of a thorough discovery process and extensive audit, we had identified a high-performing campaign that needed tweaking and the need for a remarketing campaign. Additionally, we switched the high-performing Standard Campaign to a Smart Shopping Campaign.
By seizing this opportunities, a Google Shopping, Smart Shopping Campaign enabled an approach that allowed for more targeted placement across Google Shopping and the Google Display Network.
The PPC Campaign Strategy & Execution For A Home Improvement Online Store
Now that we had established opportunities that were present, we prepared to launch the campaign. Our strategy consisted of making enhancements to their current campaign by examining the data from their Standard Shopping campaign.
We eliminated any products and keywords that were under-performing keeping only the high-performing products and keywords. Anything that was not being clicked on was removed from the new campaign.
See image below:
Furthermore, we launched a remarketing campaign because it is another effective way to increase revenue and reclaim the visitors that have showed interest in your website and products or services before.
Another way to think of this is, it will show ads to past visitors who looked at particular products but for whatever reason didn't buy the product. We took this approach because we wanted to get in front of as many new and existing prospects as possible.
We also noticed that in the client's Google Analytics data, higher priced products had a longer sales cycle and would take weeks to sell. On the other hand, lower priced items sold relatively fast in comparison, due to the lower price commitment.
Check out the conversion values generated between 12 - 30 days after the first interaction point:
In the client's Google Analytics time log data, as you can see in the last line, the conversion value is much higher, showcasing that products that are higher-priced take weeks to close.
The remarketing campaign would be another touchpoint reminding potential customers of the item they were interested in.
The PPC Campaign Results
The results of a dialed-in and highly-focused campaign delivered and surpassed the client's end goals. The campaign saw an 8X return on investment.
During the original PPC audit, we discovered the Standard campaign, and with enhancements bumped it to earning over 8X return on investment by focusing on higher-priced items, driving a higher ROI for our client.
See image:
By switching to a Smart Shopping Campaign, the advertising spend was $22,682 and that campaign generated $180,642 in revenue for the client.
The cost of ads was only 12.6% of the overall revenue generated versus the 20% goal the client set in the beginning.
The total revenue for our customer increased by 77% ($681,591 vs $384,646.68).
See Revenue Gain Proof:
The campaign also accomplished the following for our customer:
- Unique purchases were up by 54.55%
- The avg. price of each purchase is up almost 10% overall (9.47%)
- The paid search revenue increased by 81.25% ($85,214.76 to $154,448.79)
Another concern our customer shared with us was to beat the big brand guys. Another goal and metric that was beaten!
Not only did we see a large return on investment (ROI), but we also beat almost every single "big brand" in the industry.
See image:
We have shown the client and you that with the right strategy, anyone can beat a bigger company and a bigger budget.
The Takeaways & Conclusion For A Home Improvement E-Commerce Store
A PPC campaign can be an effective way for you to get more sales. Owners of e-commerce stores, regardless of what they're selling, should be setting up Google Shopping Campaigns.
While it seems like the process of creating these ads is simple, it takes hours of monitoring and tweaking to perfect a campaign. The Google Shopping platform can also be complex for beginners.
The reasons this e-commerce store experienced success was:
- They committed to a plan of action every single month for their campaign.
- Relevant ads were created and enhanced to bring in more revenue for the customer.
- Consistent monitoring and tweaking to the PPC campaign was done to ensure high-quality and relevant traffic came to the website leading to more sales.
- Signing up for a Managed PPC Service helped neatly package everything they needed in one campaign.
The PPC campaign was able to surpass our client's expectations, met goals, and even improve areas that weren't stated. PPC success does not happen overnight. It could take anywhere from three to six months to dial-in a campaign. It all depends on several variables, such as budget, ads, timing, monitoring, and tweaking.
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