You'll agree that hitting a 45% semi-annual ROAS growth rate (110% annualized) is already reason enough to document a PPC case study.
Right?
However, it's even more so when you factor in the conditions we worked under:
With all of this against us and the client, a local pharmacy based in Barcelona, we achieved:
As you can imagine, we're very proud of what the team led by Alba Brotons has accomplished and how they've framed the PPC strategies.
Want to know how we did it?
Then hang on to the next few paragraphs, because we're going to walk you through how we hit these numbers and how we helped our client multiply their results.
Let's begin:
Starting point: a small but giant-killing team
As we mentioned, our client is a pharmacy based in a Barcelona district that we've been working with for some time.
Specifically, for this pharmacy, we built and launched their website, and since then we manage organic-channel acquisition.
Without going into SEO strategy details and its results, it's important to note that the boost on this channel played a role in them trusting us once again to help them manage the paid channel.
However:
For this purpose, a no small dilemma was immediately on the table.
Is it possible to go head-to-head with true giants in pay-per-click when you know you don't have the inventory or resources of the big brands and marketplaces?
After carefully analysing the market, running a PPC viability study, gathering account data and combining it with some tests already performed in Google Ads, on top of our deep industry knowledge , we spotted gaps we could slip through.
The trick was to pick the right moments of the year to:
Yes, you read that right. A pharmacy can't use Google Shopping to sell OTC products.
Let's see below how we navigated and defined the PPC strategy to get around all these obstacles.
Challenge: beating Google's ban on non-manufacturers
Google has a policy of not allowing ads for prescription medicines in its ad inventory.
Something similar happens with some OTC (Over the Counter) or non-prescription medicines.
This may seem illogical if you stop and think about it.
Specifically, any product in this category:
Is subject to a Google Merchant ban and won't be shown in ads, unless you're the manufacturer or a major distributor.
Even so, it's not impossible to get these products into the Google Shopping ad carousel.
In fact, for this specific client we achieved a product catalogue acceptance rate close to 92% with more than 1,542 products actively advertised.
Let's look then at the strategy that enabled such visible results:
Strategy and solution from iSocialWeb: semi-automated management with Performance Max
From the beginning, we were very clear that Performance Max or max-performance campaigns were going to be our best ally.
This new Google machine-learning system replaced the shopping intelligence campaigns as of August 2022.
And we used it to leverage our efforts.
This way, with only 3 people partially dedicated to managing a catalogue of more than 2,000 products, we were able to handle daily optimization of ads, copy, multimedia content on the site, and other acquisition channels.
Let's now look at the main lines of action:
Axis 0: Building segments
Performance Max runs on machine learning, but to get the most out of it, you have to feed it data so it can learn and start operating autonomously.
For this, we fed it with all the databases we had available. Among them:
In addition, we defined custom audience segments to further fine-tune its results, carefully filtering their interests and providing browsing data, competitor reference names and leading sector websites.
After letting Performance Max learn for a few days, we started right after to restrict the scheduling, introducing time slots for the ads during the most profitable shopping moments.
And we kept narrowing other variables to progressively improve campaign profitability.
Axis 1: Forecasting demand seasonality
At this point we decided to keep a close eye on the seasonality of the different products sold in the pharmacy.
What does that mean?
Very simple: if you're a doctor or work in the health sector, you're surely familiar with the seasonality of medical conditions.
Many of them show up in short, sudden time windows, spiking demand for treatments.
A clear example is the seasonal flu, which drives up consumption of certain antivirals, decongestants or medications for immediate cold-symptom relief.
Another example is the consumption of heartburn products during the Christmas holidays.
So, talking with our client, we decided to go all in and promote more aggressively the products with demand spikes as soon as we detected them, building an early-warning system based on:
Nothing surprising or out of the ordinary so far.
Although we're sure you'd be surprised at how many ecommerces overlook this point to almost unbelievable extents.
Axis 2: Fine-tuning prices and promotional offers
Once our product-condition seasonality map was ready.
It was time to beat the competition.
We set up a price monitoring system to know which product to offer at an equal or better cost than the competition, so at any moment we knew what to promote in the Merchant feed to have the best offer for the end customer.
This, together with the 5% first-order discount policy and free shipping for orders above €60, made our conversion work much easier and helped us keep improving the client's Quality Score.
The client also welcomed our continuous advice on how to optimize the Merchant feed almost daily, where to make the necessary corrections to photos, prices and attributes to keep improving.
This great coordination between client and agency allowed us to prepare campaigns well in advance and with great precision for:
As you can see, we got a very effective system up and running to stay ahead of the competition.
Something that's very simple if you know how.
Axis 3: Sidestepping Google's ban
Still, all of the above would have fallen apart if we hadn't been able to partially work around Google's ban.
Because for some reason, Google classifies selling OTC products as a sensitive category.
Taking the ban very seriously for ads of certain products related to:
No product related to Covid-19 or mentions linked to it is shown in its shopping results or bidding at max in its auction system.
The rest of the categories have partial bans if any of the products violate any of Google's policies, for example:
Despite that, working the product feed properly, we achieved near-100% acceptance.
So, how do we get out of this dead end, you might be wondering?
Well:
To start with, we put all our strengths on the table.
We began by coordinating and setting up a working system to update almost daily the content of the product page (image, video, descriptions) and ads.
Taking great care with copy, images and video to feed the new changes back into the Merchant feed.
This process is demanding.
Fortunately, for all our clients, our PPC service includes the creation of optimized assets.
We handle end-to-end the design of images, videos and copy to ensure conversions.
And to always have an optimized Merchant feed so we can gain relevance and significantly improve the Quality Score.
Also, in this particular case, we had help from Carlos, the pharmacy's marketing lead and a dubbing enthusiast, which let us produce quality video ads using free material from Pexels and other online video libraries, in record time and at zero cost.
Something that greatly helped us work around Google's bans.
Outcome: a ROAS above 10 and growing
The results from applying this strategy speak for themselves:
With just €3,000 of monthly investment, close to €30,000 in gross revenue is generated, meaning over €15,000 in gross profit.
All of this, despite having categories that can't be sold because they're restricted to intermediaries.
Even so, we managed to convince Google to let many of our products be sold on its channel and thereby reduced the initial limitations, reaching an average catalogue coverage index close to 92%.
Final thoughts on Performance Max
Leaving the campaigns semi-automated with Performance Max has turned out in this case to be a great choice.
All this, despite the fact that Google's new machine-learning system was a complete unknown in terms of how it would perform on this account from August 2022 onwards.
Still, working audience signals thoroughly with our target-audience data (retirees, pregnant women, etc.) and boosting the most profitable product verticals (like cosmetics) let us make the most of the new system.
Combined with the ongoing effort to keep the Google Merchant product feed updated and optimized, and to account for the pharmacy's seasonality alongside our best-price-offer strategy, we've achieved outstanding results.
In addition, having Joan and Carlos, both committed and very proactive, has greatly facilitated the work through weekly feedback meetings with tracking of 7-day reports and results, allowing us to react very quickly to every change in the environment and discuss each task on a daily basis.
In short:
We've achieved outstanding results in our paid advertising campaign for a pharmacy client thanks to the constant effort to keep the Google Merchant product feed up to date and optimized.
This, combined with:
Have been decisive in turning this project into a PPC success story.