About:
Like many well-known and successful brands, ZZPerformance had humble beginnings in a garage. While working on his own Pontiac Grand Prix, ZZP’s founder, Zoom, became frustrated with other aftermarket performance brands. He saw an opportunity to create a better experience for car owners wanting to optimize their ride without breaking the bank. With this mindset, Zoom began building ZZPerformance from the ground up.
Background
Because ZZPerformance primarily sells their own unique products with higher margins, they’ve historically had a fairly high ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and low CPAs (cost per acquisition) and high AOVs (average order values). Even so, there were opportunities for improvement and growth.
Problem:
The first, and most critical problem, was the lack of traffic volume. The quality of the traffic that ZZPerformance was receiving was not great either. This was compounded by non-converting and low quality keywords that were inflating cost per acquisition and limiting potential customers from seeing their ads. As a result, they weren’t receiving enough conversions to generate an acceptable level of revenue or profit.
In addition, we found other issues within the existing ads:
- The ads themselves lacked keywords
- Minimal use of value offers in the ad copy (such as “Free Shipping”)
- Lack of call-to-actions (such as “Shop Online Today”)
- Limited use of given character space in the ad copy and ad extensions
- Lack of Dynamic Search Ads, limiting traffic on keywords that we aren’t actively bidding on
- Limited budget
Solution:
First, we paused historically non-converting keywords as well as some of the broader “prospecting” type keywords. At the time, these keywords were accruing quite a bit of cost. We also added negative keywords to reduce irrelevant clicks and cost associated with those clicks.
More relevant, higher quality keywords were added. We also began pursuing variations of their top converting keywords. Next, we developed campaigns that specifically targeted Canada, since historically Canada had generated a high amount of conversions.
We increased ad quality by including more keywords in the ad copy, utilizing more of the available character space in the headlines, descriptions, and display paths. Then, we created additional ad extensions to ensure the sitelink extensions had descriptions and that the callout extensions were informative and enticing.
Structured snippet extensions and price extensions were also created to inform customers of what types of products are sold on the site and an example of prices to expect. Typically, increasing the ad quality reduces the cost-per-click, however, in this instance the average CPC increased by 7 cents. This is due to the broader keywords being removed which were very inexpensive and the more relevant keywords are a little higher in cost.
In addition, a Dynamic Search Ads campaign was also created. DSA campaigns pull site content and essentially create keywords for the campaign. This allowed us to capture potential customers searching for products similar to what ZZPerformance sells. There is a bit of proactive maintenance required with DSA campaigns as irrelevant traffic tends to occur more frequently than general Search campaigns due to the match type of these dynamically generated keywords being “broad match”. Therefore, reviewing the search terms is necessary on a regular basis.
We found that ZZPerformance’s products with a price point of $1,000+ were displaying more often on Google than lower price point items. This had resulted in a decreased CTR (click-through rate) as well as an increased CPA, which was not profitable and was preventing other items from getting value out of Google Shopping. We adjusted to exclude the high price point products.