One of the largest US saltwater aquarium stores sells 4,000+ products, with a sale nearly every week. Midsummer Agency ran its Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, and turned an 11-day Black Friday into a November 50% over forecast.
PPCFeed Management
Our client is one of the largest ecommerce retailers in the US marine aquarium market, running a Magento store that ships to the US and Canada. It specializes in saltwater and reef supplies, and when a product doesn’t meet its quality bar, it makes its own and sells it under its own name.
The catalog is big and layered:
Every one of those layers needed its own campaigns, its own messaging and its own budget, and the messaging changed with every sale.
The client’s Black Friday didn’t last a day. It ran for 11 consecutive days, and each one brought its own set of deals across the top brands and categories:
The goal was clear: get the most revenue possible out of the whole of November, inside the budget set for Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
Every one of those deals had to show up in the right ad, on the right day, and disappear the minute it ended. Some products also carried a minimum advertised price, so their ads couldn’t mention a discount at all. Do that by hand across a few thousand ads and something goes live at the wrong moment.
The competition raised the stakes. The client’s main competitor was the bigger name in search, and it was bidding aggressively on Shopping and Search.
We ran Google Ads and Microsoft Ads for the client, with the product feed behind them: Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube and remarketing. Black Friday put all of it to the test at once, and in the years after it we tested everything else.
ServicesGoogle Ads · Microsoft Ads · Feed Management
Shopping drove most of the revenue, so we built it out brand by brand, with separate branded and non-branded campaigns and priority settings that send each search to the right one. Scripts kept the negative keywords in step, so a search for one brand didn’t drift into another brand’s campaign.
On Search, we added trademark keywords for the client’s own products and a campaign for people who search for those products by what they are, “dry live rock” rather than the store’s name. Over the months before Black Friday, we took the account from 50 campaigns to more than 250:
We also built audiences for every step of the funnel: past purchasers, cart abandoners, people browsing the deals pages and visitors to specific brands. They fed the remarketing and adjusted bids across Search and Shopping.
The client had run Black Friday promotions in earlier years, which gave us past search terms and daily performance to plan with. We mapped how spend and revenue fell on each day of November and set the daily budget to match, putting each dollar where it had earned most before.
A month before the event, we sat down with the client’s marketing team and pinned down every deal: what, which day, from what time. Then we scheduled everything before the peak.
Start and end dates, automated rules and Shopping sale features did the switching. That cut the manual work dramatically and kept last-minute mistakes out of the account.
On Black Friday itself we watched the account live. We checked that every promotion turned on and off on schedule, kept an eye on the product feed and stock levels so nothing advertised had sold out, tested links on the site, and raised bids and budgets where performance was strongest. We also stayed on hand for any last-minute change of plan.
After Black Friday we kept putting questions to the account and answering them with data. We ran 3 analyses that changed where the budget went:
We then rebuilt non-branded Shopping around what reef keepers actually shop for: pumps and plumbing, reverse osmosis, salt, additives, fish and coral foods, lighting and a dozen more. In the first month against the month before, Shopping cost 40% less for the same revenue, with cost per click down 24% and conversion rate up 18%.
Many of the store’s best sellers carried a minimum advertised price, so they rarely went on sale. We split dynamic remarketing into a sale-items campaign, built as a doorbuster, and one for the regular catalog. In a typical month the sale campaigns drew 29% of remarketing visits and 17% of its revenue. Between promotions, the regular catalog did the heavy lifting.
Black Friday came in well above what the client expected. November revenue finished 50% over forecast, with return on ad spend also 50% over forecast, and revenue on Black Friday itself was up 120% on the year before.
We are quite happy with Midsummer Team’s work on launching and maximizing results during Black Friday. I was impressed by their work ethic, energy, and strategic thinking, all with a smile. We have had stable growth since our collaboration started. Great job.
The Owner
US saltwater aquarium retailer
Micky
Pay Per Click
Led the account across Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, from the Shopping structure and bid scripts to the Black Friday plan.
Valentinas
Pay Per Click
Built out brand and trademark campaigns and holiday ads, and ran the later analyses: the Shopping rebuild, the ad format test and the sale-items split.
Ecommerce plus physical stores? B2B and B2C under one roof? One market or eleven? The businesses other agencies find too complex are the ones we make shine.
