In April 2025, an independent craft supplies shop reached out to our marketing team as they looked to explore options on how to improve their digital marketing presence.
While they have a physical location not far from our offices – the reason for their enquiry with us – the majority of their sales are made online, where they have a great reputation for their carefully curated range.
Ecommerce is highly competitive, particularly in this sector, where cheaper supplies made to lower standards are very easy to come by.
Ensuring success for the online store meant a holistic approach, so as well as developing a long term SEO strategy, we also planned to launch shopping campaigns across the Google Ads network with the aim of achieving quick results.
Developing a Google Ads Strategy
We initially launched a standard shopping campaign, using manual bidding. While using smart bidding strategies is often more effective in the long term, campaigns need this hands-on oversight at the beginning so we can better manage initial search queries.
Any kind of paid ad campaign does have running costs associated with it – the clue is in the name! Ensuring return on investment is very important – if a click costs more than the product purchased, the ROI is negative.
Craft supplies – even in such a curated catalogue – have such a wide range of prices that some items are very low-cost. The unit economics of the business therefore meant that we could only go after high-ticket items.
The products we chose to target were around 5-10% of the product feed within Google Merchant Centre, since it would be unprofitable to target the other 90%, low-ticket items.
As part of our management, we also set up Shopify e-commerce conversion tracking prior to any campaigns going live, so we could track the purchase values and add-to-carts – something that was missing from the shop’s reporting metrics prior to our management.
Initial Performance
We spent the first six months collecting search query data, and negating a range of keywords and audiences that led to traffic with the wrong intent being pulled through shopping ads.
While the return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) wasn’t particularly high during these periods, it was positive – and we knew that the initial strategy was mostly about getting intent correct first, and optimising the shopping listings toward top performers.
The other notable point was that the shop also benefited from repeat purchases. Crafters are typically loyal to good quality, sustainable suppliers, so new users often return to purchase, on average, roughly two or three more times. This meant that the unit economic figures in this period didn’t need to be extremely high.
By November 2025, we conducted our largest experiment to date on the account, implementing standard shopping vs Performance Max. With seasonality peaking as we approached Christmas, we wanted to test how smart bidding would impact results.
Within a 30-day window, Performance Max saw:
- An 86.5% increase in conversion value from just a 27% increase in spend
- The ad spend cost-per-purchase drop by 31%.
We migrated most spending across to Performance Max following the experiment ending, but kept running a standard shopping campaign to pick up low-bid terms.
Initial Performance
We spent the first six months collecting search query data, and negating a range of keywords and audiences that led to traffic with the wrong intent being pulled through shopping ads.
While the return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) wasn’t particularly high during these periods, it was positive – and we knew that the initial strategy was mostly about getting intent correct first, and optimising the shopping listings toward top performers.
The other notable point was that the shop also benefited from repeat purchases. Crafters are typically loyal to good quality, sustainable suppliers, so new users often return to purchase, on average, roughly two or three more times. This meant that the unit economic figures in this period didn’t need to be extremely high.
By November 2025, we conducted our largest experiment to date on the account, implementing standard shopping vs Performance Max. With seasonality peaking as we approached Christmas, we wanted to test how smart bidding would impact results.
Within a 30-day window, Performance Max saw:
- An 86.5% increase in conversion value from just a 27% increase in spend
- The ad spend cost-per-purchase drop by 31%.
We migrated most spending across to Performance Max following the experiment ending, but kept running a standard shopping campaign to pick up low-bid terms.
Recent Performance
As of writing, the campaigns have now been live for roughly one year. To date, we’ve produced a total ROAS of 332%. In the past three months, the ROAS has been a lot closer to 400%.
The Performance Max campaign uses a target return-on-ad-spend (tROAS) strategy, so smart bidding doesn’t become complacent, and returns a ROAS in line with our goals.
The implementation of the strategy has been very simple: we keep a close eye on top-spending listings each month. Using historical data, pause any product listings with high spend, but not achieving the target ROAS across 90/180/365 days.
This way, Google’s always optimising itself toward top-performing listings, as it cuts off any waste which could be using up our Google Ads budget.
We also negate any irrelevant traffic as negative keywords from the search term reports. To date, roughly 1,000 negative keywords have been added to the account.
Recent performance struggling to get your eCommerce ads running effectively?
Getting a shopping feed to run profitably isn’t always easy, despite the solutions sounding relatively simple. Before you do anything, check your unit economics:
- Can you run profitable ads – what’s the highest your cost-per-purchase can be before you start to lose money? If the margin is too low, shopping ads might not be for you.
- What are your organic purchase rates like? If organic users aren’t purchasing your products at a high purchase rate, it might imply that a wider issue may be at hand. A good rule of thumb is to only run shopping ads once you have a sustainable organic purchase flow – that way, you know your product has demand.
- Search query intent can be everything, and shopping intent can often carry different meanings. If you aren’t checking your search query reports frequently, your shopping listings could be ranking for completely irrelevant searches.
- Abandonment rates are also a key metric. If >80% of your add to cart users are abandoning their checkouts, it could suggest that users are finding better offers or products elsewhere while in the shopping journey. Competitor analysis may be required at this stage, but organic data should help inform you of these decisions, too.
Looking for some extra help?
That being said, if you have any questions about running Google Ads for your e-commerce brand and are looking for some expert help, please reach out to our marketing team. They’d be delighted to help with your queries.