Northern Arizona Wind and Sun is a reseller of solar panels and equipment. Over the last few years, they have been working to grow their online presence and revenue. In 2018, they struggled to meet their advertising goals as Google Shopping was using a large portion of the budget but was not achieving a solid return. This campaign specifically was in need of an optimization. Using the performance data for 2018, we were able to optimize the account to ensure their goals were being met for 2019.
Being a reseller of solar equipment, they have higher AOV’s. Generally when this is the case, we tend to see a longer buying window, which can cause issues when optimizing Shopping Campaigns. Depending on the price of the product, buying windows are about 30-45 days. For products with higher prices, the buying window increases to about 30-90 days. During this timeframe, if any products are spending but not actually converting, a PPC Specialist may decrease the bids to ensure return goals are met. This can take quite a bit of time to properly manage. If you are getting anxious about a product overspending and decrease a bid too early, those “big ticket” products may not display and sell as they could.
One of our biggest wins for this client was migrating from the standard Shopping Campaign to Google’s Smart Shopping program, which nearly doubled their return. By using current and historical data, these campaign types take the average buying window into account to dynamically manage bids. Additionally these campaigns adjust bids based on a number of factors like demographic, location, time & device. We can then take the data from the product performance and exclude products that may not be what their customers are looking for.
By switching to Smart Shopping, we were able to obtain more clicks at a lower cost. Our average CPC decreased by 24% while our clicks increased by 16.98%. Since these campaigns are primarily automated, we were able to shift that time to focus on Search Campaigns. This has allowed us to effectively test new types of Ads and extensions as well as new bidding methods, which has also increased revenue.