Marco Bicego: A Case Study

Like many digital marketers, we are drawn to data. And while we love to comb through all of the statistics, what really makes the difference is how we use the data.

We connected with a brand that was interested in running paid search and social ads to promote their handcrafted, 18-karat Italian jewelry collections. Upon earning their business, we put together a media plan that included a Google Ads Performance Max campaign. 

Performance Max is a campaign in which Google automates targeting and delivery across all Google platforms. One of its best uses is to introduce new potential customers to a brand since the multiple Google platforms provide such a wide reach. Many of our other clients have experienced desirable results in this type of campaign (we saw an average of 425% ROAS across all of our clients the month before), so we expected similar results for our new jewelry client.

Google recommends running a campaign for at least 14 days before making any changes as this allows the platform to pick up momentum and generate enough data to optimize results. After running the Performance Max campaign for the first month, we were underwhelmed by the results. In fact, we embarrassingly did not see one conversion from this campaign.

So, we dove into the data. We asked ourselves the questions, what do we know about this client, their products, and their target audience? What can we learn from the campaigns that did convert? How can we apply these learnings to produce better results next month?

Given the nature of the products, we recognized that the price points would rarely result in an impulse purchase, especially for users unfamiliar with the brand. On a similar note, we noticed that the average order value (AOV) from purchases made through Google Ads was lower than their sitewide AOV. Partly, this was due to running mostly top-of-funnel campaigns on Google. We wanted to test the other part: are Google users more “entry-level” purchasers?

This gave us an idea: what if we ran a Performance Max campaign, but only promoted the products with lower price points?

The following month, we did just that. In less than one week, the campaign generated a purchase and produced a ROAS of 1225%! Needless to say, our new client was pleased with the results–and how quickly they happened!

The amount of data we come across as marketers can be overwhelming at times. However, data can benefit you if you know how to apply it correctly. In this instance, we were able to identify key metrics to make a difference in our paid media campaign results.