Going from 2.27 ROAS to 5.31 ROAS in 5 Months for a Men's Grooming Brand

90% of brands we talk to have 1 single problem

"We see a dip in ROAS as we scale"

This is a common problem and we are sharing it so it benefits brands, as Bharat Mavens we are all about building strong consumer brands and marketing will play a critical role in it

By the end of this article you will know exactly what are the steps we have taken to avoid this scenario and scale the brand.

In 5 months this brand went from 2200 conversions to 5050 conversions, while ROAS grew by 2x.

THE CLIENT’S BACKGROUND

A men’s grooming brand from India, a fast-growing VC-backed brand operating for the last 4 to 5 years. They have been one of the pioneers in launching many first-for-men grooming products.

GETTING STARTED

Before onboarding with us spending around mid-6 figure spends on Google ads for performance at a 2 to 2.5 ROAS, but a major chunk of the budget was dedicated to branded campaigns on Google, which isn’t good

We first started working with them on one of their other smaller accounts and seeing the turnaround we delivered for that brand (from below 0.3 ROAS to nearly 1.8 ROAS in just 30 days), we were also handed their main account

THE GOAL

Become EBIDTA & CM2 Profitable, while maintaining 20% compounded growth every month

They had raised a funding round and wanted to deliver on performance but they were conservative on spending only when profitability was in sight, we took up this as a challenge. It is often rare to improve both ROAS while you are scaling, and we were able to achieve it

By month 5, we delivered while scaling to 2x more conversions

THE BACKGROUND (Problem Identification)

Over the past 90 days, the company had been struggling to achieve a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) of around 2, but unable to scale. This meant that their advertising efforts were not yielding the expected results, and they were far from achieving profitability.

Upon closer examination, several issues were identified as the root causes of their struggles:

1. Over-Reliance on Branded Search Terms

The campaign was over-indexing on branded search terms, which can be expensive and not always the most effective way to reach potential customers.

2. Poor data

The pixels were incorrectly setup and maximum data was never being sent to Google, a clear lack of learning for the tag

3. Lack of meaningful account structure

There were at least 15 campaigns running, all convoluted, running same products, converting just existing customers and no sight of improvement in performance

Campaigns consolidation begins

The above is the ad account we had audited when so many campaigns were live

4. Unoptimized Bidding Strategies The bidding strategies in place were not driving the desired results. This lack of optimization was affecting the cost-effectiveness of the campaign.

5. Poor Conversion Rate The ads were not effectively converting the traffic into sales, which was a critical issue for profitability.

Month 1 - November

Key focus areas

• Tracking
• Account consolidation
• Products elimination

Actions taken

• Day 1, was all about setting up correct tracking with enhanced conversions. As bad data makes all other optimizations futile
• To avoid just inflating dashboard ROAS, without meaningful impact on business growth we started with Branded search campaigns. Created a dedicated campaign just for branded terms, allocated less than 10% of total spend to this campaign and capped it. In every other campaign either the brand terms were excluded or added as negative keyword

• Paused all no-spend or low-spend campaigns along with campaigns where majority of products were out of stock
• Started with fresh campaign creation for 3 of their best-seller categories. Each one in a separate Performance Max campaign. Dedicated audience signal created for each category and brand list excluded
• They have over 15+ categories, but we decided to restrict advertising to just 6 as with others unit economics did not support spending on ads
• Each of the campaigns created were sticly applied a filter to advertise only

With this we ended the month at a 2.27 ROAS

Month 2 - December

Key focus areas

• Optimization of new campaigns
• Shopping campaign

Actions taken

• Whenever we start a new campaign, we allow it to run for 7 to 8 days with minimum changes so it collects data
• In the first month, only 3 to 4 categories had dedicated campaigns, started the creation of campaigns for the rest 2 other this time both shopping campaign
• Within the same category, the AOV of products had a wide range, so decided to break into sub-categories with it's own assets and audience signal. This lead to increased impressions on high value products which earlier were rarely being served

We have rule that if the AOV differs by more than 1.5X of the main product, then they get a separate campaign or asset group based on the position and objective of ad account

• Performance max campaign were started with assets, but by 3rd week some categories were struggling so decided to switch to a no feed asset group in Performance max
• Tested a demand generation campaign for 2 weeks, but decided against it
• There was lot of volatility in December given a lot of other competitor brands had big deals and we were losing impression share. During this process decided to lower prices and up the budget, which was positive and it got good volume of sales
• During this process of campaign management, we were keenly observing the competitor landscape with GMC reports, manual research
• Some campaigns had gained momentum so started increasing their Target ROAS as they were spending full budget. An automated bidding campaign must never spend full budget at your established targets as it is a sign that there is so much untapped volume. If it is spending then up your goals

With this we ended the month at a 2.65 ROAS

Month 3 - January

Key focus areas

• Google Merchant Center Optimization
• Shopping campaign optimization

Actions taken

• Out of 40+ brands we have worked with, only 1 ever made changes to Google Merchant Center feed to improve their performance. This is the biggest competitive advantage for any brand that is hiding in plain sight. It is boring, it demands patience, but once you see the impact you can never not go without optimizing this. We have done it again and again and know this works
• This was the time where we spent more time on Google Merchant Center feed than inside ad account. As by now all campaigns had data and we had structured on target keywords, searches, audience for each of the product

Here is the link to a LinkedIn post which discusses on 5 reports to use in GMC - https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/jainkanish_marketing-sales-ads-activity-7169239987647922176-O8uz/

• Shopping ads were refined with negative keywords to capture only most bottom of the funnel search terms. This is on purpose as for new campaign conversion data is important and BOF keywords convert best. Then one can expand upper funnel but start from bottom
• To optimize GMC we look into search terms report, insights tab, audience signal, keyword planner and choose keywords where we hypothesise we are most likely to win and then go all after it
• Don't just optimize title and description, work on other attributes also like product_category
• In fact "custom_label" attribute truly helps identify good performers, bad spenders and ghost products to focus maximum budget on best ROI

With this we ended the month at a 2.77 ROAS

Month 4 - February

Key focus areas

• YouTube ads
• Optimizing Performance Max

Actions taken

• Started with YouTube ads for the best-seller category, all the best ads from Meta ads were used. Each product in the best-seller category got one ad group with a personalized audience

• By now had completed GMC optimization on top 3 categories, now shifted towards slower moving categories for which shopping campaigns were dedicated

In one of the products improvement in GMC feed had such a positive impact that it increased our DRR from 2 to 3, to over 10 to 15 within span of a couple of weeks

With this we ended the month at a 3.03 ROAS

Month 5 - March

• Scaling YouTube ads
• Scaling Performance Max

Actions Taken

• This month was all about scaling, with all foundations set - account structure, GMC feed, negative keywords, inventory usage....
• In YouTube expanded beyond just 1 category and introduced other categories
• In PMax increased budgets and little to not change in setup

With this we ended the month at a 5.01 ROAS

In summary the solutions

THE SOLUTION

A strategic buyer journey

Over-reliance on Branded terms

Created a dedicated campaign just for branded terms, allocated less than 10% of total spend to this campaign and capped it. In every other campaign either the brand terms were excluded or added as negative keyword, so the focus is on true incrementally?

Poor Data

This was the 1st action, the 1st day we took over the account, to fix data. All starts from here

Consolidation structure

By day 7 had reduced from 15 campaigns to under 8, without compromising on spend or efficiency of the account in any case

Bidding Strategy Optimization

The bidding strategies were thoroughly analyzed and optimized. This included adjusting bids for different keywords and placements to improve cost-effectiveness.

Landing Page Improvements

Here they had already done a decent job of having a feature rich page, but our main input was to make the page more lively towards the audience and focus on USP of product. As for a challenger brand customers want to know the reason for them to switch to this new brand, so that was made clear and upfront

Testing

We rarely test ad copy and stuff, they are not incremental.

Our philosophy to test only things that satisfy 3 requirements
1/ Must be scalable
2/ Should be repeatable
3/ Can be documented and taught

This eliminates 80% of wasted spends, spent on "testing" things that         

We set targets on big prizes which are repeatable, scalable and teachable like refinding keyword strategy, cracking YouTube campaigns (mostly considered ROAS awareness channel) with a positive ROAS

And finally,

The growth is evident

.......

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