What does a good ROAS look like? Like a cocktail mixed by the best bartender: every ingredient is in perfect proportion. Your invested money is the base, but the flavour (the return on ad spend, ROAS in professional terms) comes from the right marketing strategies, precise targeting and long-term thinking. Once you have the perfect mix, even a single sip of that cocktail feels euphoric. In other words, every forint you spend on ads pays back many times over.
In the world of e-commerce, many people still only dream of ads that are genuinely profitable and that they can then scale up nicely.
Some say that profitable advertising is even harder and more expensive in the B2B sector, yet at Frozen Mango Media we managed to take an online shop from a ROAS of 1.16 to a 47.8x return on ad spend in 6 months with Google Ads. This was a real challenge, as they have countless competitors who were visibly pouring money into ads, not only on Google Ads but on other platforms too.
The online shop in question approached us towards the end of 2023, as they weren't satisfied with their current online marketing results.
We suggested they first request a Google Ads audit (ad account review), in which, in a nutshell, we examine what has happened in the ad account so far, highlight the sticking points and make recommendations on how results could be improved.
The audit revealed that no new campaigns had been launched for them in recent years; only the ones launched back then had been optimised, even though a lot had changed in the Google Ads ecosystem over the years.
After we presented the audit, they placed their trust in us, and shortly afterwards we started the onboarding process and our ongoing partnership.
How did we start?
Without aiming to be exhaustive, we paid particular attention to the following:
- Reviewing the online shop (whether pricing, page loading speed, user-friendliness and other important factors are in order)
- Completing the brief
- Connecting analytics tools and setting up conversion tracking (GTM, GA4, GMC, etc.)
- Planning the advertising strategy and launching the first ads.
In the first month we achieved a ROAS of only 1.16, as we had to rebuild everything from scratch.
By the second month the results of the campaigns we had launched the month before were starting to come through nicely: one campaign already delivered a 26.49x return in the second month, while another delivered 9.04. That's how much patience and fine-tuning bid strategies matter, even within a single month.
By the third month we had fine-tuned the advertising strategy, the bidding strategies and the campaign types even further. We also launched a new campaign and kept switching off keywords that weren't necessarily effective.
What changed by the fourth month? We aimed to bring campaign results close to or above a ROAS of 15, but weighting the budget was tricky, because the campaigns that didn't reach a ROAS of 15 were strategically important. There we tried to fine-tune results through targeting and bid strategies. We also excluded from the Performance Max campaigns the products that weren't important to the client and had lower margins.
By the fifth month there was a huge ROAS improvement, right at the start of the summer slow season. Compared with the first month's return on ad spend of 1.16, in the fifth month we reached a 25.19x return, achieving the breakthrough for the online shop. This was also thanks to continuously prioritising the different product categories by margin, seasonality and so on, and weighting the budget by strategic and return considerations. A return of 25 is generally considered outstanding for ad accounts, let alone in competitive industries.
What happened by the end of the sixth month? In the middle of the summer slow season we managed to build further on the previous month's breakthrough: after the previous month's ROAS of 25.19, we finally reached a 47.88x return, almost doubling the previous month's result. We were admittedly (a little) surprised that one of our campaigns achieved a 160x return in July, when most people are on their well-deserved summer holidays and work isn't necessarily their focus.
What were the success factors that led to such ROAS growth with Google ad management in just six months?
Without aiming to be exhaustive (we could repeat the points listed under „how we started”, but we won't):
- At the start, the exact goals, expectations and the timeframe for achieving them need to be clarified with the client. It's important that these are realistic and that expectations are in balance with the marketing budget (in our experience this often goes off track)
- For an online shop, it's important to clarify when to focus on which product categories or products, how margins develop, and which products sell well seasonally
- The advertising strategy has to be built according to the objectives, but it's important to know that it is often far from final: everything keeps changing, so it always has to be re-planned in light of the changes
- It isn't enough to launch ads once; they need continuous optimisation to be truly effective. Checking your ads „once every leap year” is not enough
- Fine-tuning and testing bid strategies is also unavoidable if you want a good ROAS, because the same solution (strategy) won't work everywhere
- If Performance Max campaigns are set up well and you get the most out of them, there shouldn't be many problems (take this with a pinch of salt, as there are banana skins there too)
- Running brand protection campaigns is a „must have” in a competitive market, where competitors often bid on your brand in Google search
- Just as competitors can bid on your brand, you can bid on your competitors' and win more of the market for yourself (elegantly, of course)
- Continuously monitor which keywords your ads appear for, and add the irrelevant ones to your negative keyword list
- Make use of the potential of remarketing and don't miss the low-hanging fruit: retarget those who have already interacted with your online shop
Would you like to outsource your ad management? Request a no-obligation quote from us and let's talk through the options.