Tombow’s office, arts, and crafts products are sold around the globe and in the United States’ most trusted craft and hobby retailers. Tombow came to Classy Llama with extremely low return on ad spend (ROAS) for their Google Ads.
As we learned more about their business and current efforts, we saw three major reasons for their low ad performance.
The first was a low average per product price. We needed to increase overall traffic and conversions to ensure revenue was sufficient. Low average per product prices aren’t typically an issue for organic traffic, but with paid traffic, it’s hard to improve your return on ad spend when you have a low average order value and each conversion costs a few dollars.
Another key challenge was competition online with resellers. Tombow sells both B2B and B2C and is carried by the largest craft and hobby stores in the nation. They also sell their products on Amazon which has a higher brand and ranking power than their own brand site. Tombow does not have MAP (minimum advertised price) rules in place and often they were being undersold by their dealers.
Finally, we found the Tombow wasn’t optimizing their ad copy and it needed to be improved. Ad text used inconsistent copy styles and weren’t reaching character limits, which limited the amount of keywords in the ad text. Sitelink, callout, and structured snippet extensions were not being fully utilized either.
Tombow has strong brand recognition in the world of craft and hobbies, so there wasn’t much of a need to assign a large budget to generic prospecting campaigns, which are campaigns focused on generic non branded keywords such as “markers for sale”. These keywords are usually the first point of contact with a business when a customer is still looking for the product they are interested in purchasing and has not decided on a brand.
Instead, we focused more heavily on Tombow’s brand and smart shopping campaigns. Smart Shopping was able to weed out the “researchers” with the product image, description, and price information. Our campaigns targeted customers who were ready to buy and gave them the ability to see the product, go to the site, and purchase. Otherwise, customers would have to click on each individual search ad of companies selling similar products and decide who had the product they were looking for, with the desired price. This was a win, since the average cost per click on Shopping Campaigns tends to be 30-50% less than Search Campaigns.
Finally, we implemented additional sitelink, callout, and structured snippet extensions. These new extensions were created to better use the available character limits and increase the real estate taken up by ads. Once these changes were made, Tombow saw the quality score on their ads increase and their CPC decrease.
The result was an increase in profitability through a reduction in paid ad spend, an increase in revenue of 25.47%, and an increase in ROAS by 154%.