Key Tactics

• Precise Search Terms – They sell a lot of different types of trees so I had to make sure we showed an ad for the correct type of tree for every relevant search and land the visitor on the right page. This used to be easy to do but over the last 5 years Google has overridden the keywords advertisers use with their own AI algorithms. Getting Google to show the correct ads has become a cat and mouse game of blocking irrelevant keywords.
• Device Bid Adjustments – They had been managing the ads themselves and never thought to look at conversion rates by device type. E-commerce sites typically see a 65% lower conversion rate on mobile vs desktop so you need to adjust the bids to make sure you are paying a reasonable price.
• Shopping Ads – Previously they had only been running text ads so I got them set up with shopping ads. Those are the picture ads you see on Google and Bing.
• Checkout Problem – Some of the trees require that you select values in additional fields before being able to checkout. I noticed there was a bug on the site that didn’t let the additional dropdown fields work on most devices. Once that got fixed the conversion rate shot up 25%.
• Stopped Facebook Ads – Facebook is a great platform for companies who sell to a broad audience. However, it just doesn’t work when less than 1% of the population would ever want your product and you only sell in one metro area. The money they had been spending on Facebook was not converting at all.