Google Ads Account Structure for eCommerce Brands
Oct 31, 2022When I review or take on the management a Google Ads account for eCommerce brands I find a very common theme across all of these accounts in that they do not have an overarching strategy for how they will:
- Increase the performance of all products
- Increase & Decrease spending through sale & off peak seasons
- Use the different types of campaigns so that they work with each other rather than competing or cannibalising results
With the introduction of Performance Max campaigns this is fast becoming the biggest issue with Google Ads.
Like an account I reviewed last week which was run by a self proclaimed industry leader for running Google Ads for ecommerce brands where in fact the only thing they achieved was tripling ad spend for a 9% reduction in sales - yes that’s right 3 times the ad spend for 9% less sales.
The reason this is happening is because many people & agencies make 2 core mistakes:
1. The only focus on ROAS taking no notice of declining revenue or market share. In fact I have had some agencies openly say that they decrease spend so that they can increase ROAS results to help with their own performance based management fee.
Yes ROAS is an important metric BUT it can never be at the expense of reducing your total revenue.
2. They only focus on campaign level optimisations with no strategy or thought given to how to have the structure at your account level.
Your account structure is the secret sauce for success because you need to have this set up correctly so that you are able to:
- Optimise individual product category performance. It is very common that as an ecommerce brand that you will have seasonal products that appeal to different audiences. So you need to make sure that you have product segmentation at a campaign level so that you can control the budgets, bidding and audiences targeting dependant on that group of products.
- Run effective high budget sales campaigns that won’t ruin the performance of your always on campaigns
- Scale & Grow your brand in a safe & sustainable way. Because your monthly ad spend is irrelevant if you have confidence in the results that Google Ads will give your business
