Footwear Brand – From Loss at 15L Revenue to Starting from 0 and then at 35% MOM Growth

This is one of the most challenging brands we have worked on the Google ads platform.

We have seen everything with this brand and its team, laying off departments (brand side), cutting down budgets, multiple hour-long internal calls….and then a shining light at the end

If you are a brand owner/founder/marketer then this article will teach you what working on this brand taught us patience and trusting the process. It will again strengthen our belief Bharat Mavens of giving at least 3 months needed to shape the account and brand

As for the first 2 months, there were hardly any signs of improvement in performance through a list of changes, optimizations, and development of new strategies was being done

But in the next 2 months, we reaped the rewards and truly understood the leverage we had built up in the previous 2 months.

Background

This lifestyle brand has been running since 2016 and then the now CEO had acquired this brand in 2019 and started operating it. They also rode the 2020 boom but then reality set in by the end of 2021 and things got rough and tight

It had scaled to over 15L to 17L per month via ads, but they were just burning cash incessantly. But in the next few months, they stopped everything and decided to start from zero

Brand has a good presence on the marketplace and does over 50L+ per month on 7+ marketplaces, now they were focused to get their sales on website up and running.

Had the first call with CEO in the month of November 2023, he was conspicuous

“We are starting again from 0 on the website but this time, I am going to do it in profitable way. We have learned a lesson from the past”

It was clear “Profits over everything”

They had a tax contention with Meta, and so wanted to start with Google until the issue was resolved.

Brand details

• Over 1000+ SKU’s
• Little to no data on Google, as before they were spending all on Fb only
• 6+ Collections in 2 categories

Challenges

• No data as they were mostly reliant on Meta ads all this while
• Some products to be removed from the inventory so pressure to liquidate them first
• In a few other products, some prominent fast-moving sizes were missing
• They had recently laid off the developer team so the website optimization was still pending

Goal

PROFITS

Month 1

Plan

• Created a list of all SKU’s and sent it to brand, where they marked the products which were in inventory which were not, which were on top priority to sell and the next priority
• After the list, we decided to go ahead with promoting best-sellers within this “allowed products” list
• Setup all the reporting and our internal scripts in Google ads for better product optimization

Implementation

• Counterintuitive with all the things you hear (and at times even I have given the advice), we still started with PMax campaign for best-sellers.

Every best practice doesn’t apply to every brand, there are criterias which are mostly hidden from the masses

• Another shopping catch-all campaign to promote other non-best-seller products
• Branded search (we are strict about keeping this under 10% of the total budget) as the brand had some organic demand already and we used to build good data for Google to identify the right audience

With all this the reality was still to set in, an 80% drop in revenue that month’s end

Remember this drop is intentional, as you optimize for profits and not just revenue, this was a call taken from brand founder and the whole team had one focus to get profits

Actions

• If it’s Google ads, then we knew Google Merchant Center (GMC) improvement is a must. We have an internal guide spanning over 5 pages just on this explaining each in detail
• Each and everything we started to improve from title to adding new attributes
• Started to resolve diagnostic errors in GMC like price mismatch, mobile landing page errors. We focused on errors rather than warnings, as errors stop serving your products while warnings are still ok to start
• By 2nd week the clicks, and impressions started coming in but hardly any conversions. Started diving deep and found that the brand has been selling this product also in marketplace but, but…. at a whooping ₹1000+ lower price than on website. Immediately informed brand and asked for a price match which took a few days to update
• Tried launching another category with a separate Performance Max campaign but had to pause within 15 days due to poor performance

Grew the ROAS by a modest 12% this month

Summary

• Not much improvement in Google metrics
• We were very clear from the start we are optimizing for incrementally and new customers and the conversions we get from branded-search are not to be joyous about at all. So apart from branded search did get a few conversions but nothing meaningful and nowhere close to the target
• Total revenue just above 1L for the whole month

Month 2

Challenge

• Clicky products
• No conversions from the main campaign
• GMC optimization

Goal

• Stabilize the main Performance Max campaign
• Establish a base-line ROAS in branded-search

Launches

• Started a category-specific full-asset PMax campaign and let it run without intervention for 2 weeks
• Launch of YouTube campaign by just using their previous assets of Meta ads, this was mainly YouTube shorts ads and a conversion campaign only
• Launched a new separate campaign with no-asset PMax for their new collection.

Actions

• We faced a situation of what we call it as “Click products” this is common in high SKU categories. It is when a product gets a lot of clicks but no conversions, we take a call based on spend and other metrics and exclude such products if the landing page

• Narrow down the focus products of the main PMax as we had set a higher ROAS target and not all products could meet the mark
• For a lifestyle brand, only 4 things matter most on the website – Images, price, returns and size guide. So start working on each of them individually and parallel with the brand’s new developer
• By this time the main campaign had some conversions, so we decided to optimize the audience signal using search terms, competitor keywords, an insights tab and the main keywords targeted in the title
• Optimization of product tile and other 7+ attributes for best-seller products were done by now
• Started removing products with a high number of clicks as we saw sizes weren’t available and spoke to brand to liquidate via the marketplace

From the beginning, we were clear on avoiding cannibalization of PMax campaign from the branded search terms, for this created a negative list, submitted to support. filled the form and all the available ways to negate the brand terms were taken

By the 3rd week of 2nd month, the conversions were consistent, a campaign started to deliver better metrics, and fewer changes to the strategy required

Month 2

About 35% improvement while the ROAS went from under 2 to above 2.5

The next 2 months is when things dialed in, when all that we were doing came to life and we started to scale

Month 3-4

By now

• Started getting conversions
• The main performance max campaign is inconsistent but still getting conversions here and there

Actions

• Top 40% of products in all categories advertised are optimized via the GMC and contribute to bulk of conversions, the rest 60% we plan to do it by Month 5 end. As we have nailed down the procedure this should be pretty quick now
• Some of the terms like “[BRAND NAME] PRODUCT CATEGORY” we noticed were low converting in our main branded keyword ad group. So shifted into a fresh ad group targeted only the variation of brand keyword and optimized landing page
• Split the performance max campaign into two categories – Men and Women, both run via no-feed
• Shopping campaigns paused for 2 categories out of 3 being advertised as they were unprofitable even after cosnistent improvemtn in GMC
• Created assets in Canva for the new category campaigns and they have been driving some good traffic
• Launched a Unisex collection campaign and surprisingly it’s performance is better than the main campaign. We had already optimised the GMC listing before launch

By month 4 we are at 4.2 ROAS currently and consistent 35% growth in revenue month-on-month and at a profitable ROAS

Current position

• Meta ads are started
• New collections are in, plan to launch them via Meta ads
• Past inventory is almost done

Their ROAS is better than it has ever been

Thank you for reading

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