THE CLIENT’S BACKGROUND
This is a men’s grooming brand from India, a fast-growth VC-backed brand operating for last 4 to 5 years. They have been one of the pioneers in launching many first-for men grooming products. Hero products around trimmers & razors
GETTING STARTED
Before onboarding with us spending around 6 to 7L+ on Google ads at a 2 ROAS, but a major chunk of budget was dedicated to branded campaigns on Google, which isn’t good
We first started working with them on one of their other smaller accounts and seeing the turnaround we delivered for that brand (from below 0.3 ROAS to nearly 1.8 ROAS in just 30 days), we were also handed their main account
THE GOAL
Become EBIDTA & CM2 Profitable, while maintaining 20% compounded growth every month
They had recently raised a funding round and wanted to deliver on performance but they were conservative on spending only when profitability in sight, we took up this as a challenge. It is often rare to improve both ROAS while you are scaling, and we were able to achieve it
We delivered
THE BACKGROUND (Problem Identification)
Over the past 90 days, the company had been struggling to achieve a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) of around 2, but unable to scale. This meant that their advertising efforts were not yielding the expected results, and they were far from achieving profitability.
Upon closer examination, several issues were identified as the root causes of their struggles:
1. Over-Reliance on Branded Search Terms
The campaign was over-indexing on branded search terms, which can be expensive and not always the most effective way to reach potential customers
2. Poor data
The pixels were incorrectly setup and maximum data was never being sent to Google, a clear lack of learning for the tag
3. Lack of meaningful account structure
There were at least 15 campaigns running, all convoluted, running same products, converting just existing customers and no sight of improvement in performance
The above is the ad account we had audited when so many campaigns were live
4. Unoptimized Bidding Strategies
The bidding strategies in place were not driving the desired results. This lack of optimization was affecting the cost-effectiveness of the campaign.
5. Poor Conversion Rate
The ads were not effectively converting the traffic into sales, which was a critical issue for profitability.
THE SOLUTION
A strategic buyer journey
Over-reliance on Branded terms
Created a dedicated campaign just for branded terms, allocated less than 10% of total spend to this campaign and capped it. In every other campaign either the brand terms were excluded or added as negative keyword, so the focus is on true incrementality
Poor Data
This was the 1st action, the 1st day we took over the account, to fix data. All starts from here
Consolidation structure
By day 7 had reduced from 15 campaigns to under 8, without compromising on spend or efficiency of the account in any case
Our current consolidated account structure
Bidding Strategy Optimization
The bidding strategies were thoroughly analyzed and optimized. This included adjusting bids for different keywords and placements to improve cost-effectiveness.
Landing Page Improvements
Here they had already done a decent job of having a feature rich page, but our main input was to make the page more lively towards the audience and focus on USP of product as for a challenger brand customers want to know the reason for them to switch to this new brand, so that was made clear and upfront
Testing
We rarely test ad copy and stuff, they are not incremental. We set targets on big prizes which are repeatable, scalable and teachable like refinding keyword strategy, cracking YouTube campaigns (mostly considered ROAS awareness channel) with a positive ROAS
The SUCCESS
By month 5 the results spoke for themselves
Above are results achieved in month 5, the spends decreased while the revenue increased by nearly 30%
All while less than 5% of spend to branded campaigns
Getting 2+ ROAS YouTube campaign, which otherwise is considered hardest to crack and treated just for awareness, let alone conversions
