One of the biggest decking and railing retailers in the US sells thousands of products online, and more than 40% of its sales close over the phone. Midsummer Agency ran its Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, and made the calls count as brightly as the clicks.
PPCFeed ManagementTracking
Our client is one of the largest decking and railing retailers in the US, with a showroom and one of the biggest in-stock selections in the country. Everything a deck needs is on the site: boards, railing systems, post caps, lighting and the fixings in between, across thousands of products once every size and color counts as its own.
The store runs on a fully custom Magento build, made to handle a large volume of orders and a catalog rich in attributes and options.
The same catalog serves 2 kinds of buyer:
Plenty of both pick up the phone rather than check out. More than 40% of sales closed through the call center, which made this an ecommerce account with a sales floor attached.
We took the account over from a previous agency, starting with an audit of Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
The client wanted 2 things: more sales on the site, and more calls into the call center. The next step was reporting that could show where each one came from.
When we took over, we saw room to grow in 5 areas.
That last one shaped everything. On a peak summer day the ads could bring back around 10 times their cost in online revenue, and the client could still find sales slower than expected. The dashboard counted the checkout, the call center counted the phone, and there was not yet a way to connect a call to the ad that prompted it.
Product data was the other big opportunity. The custom Magento build could only share each product in its general form with Google, so a shopper searching for one exact railing color or post size saw a generic listing, or nothing at all.
We took on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads together, rebuilt the product feed, and brought the phones into the reporting. We also supported the client’s in-house analytics lead on Google Analytics as the account moved from Universal Analytics to GA4.
ServicesGoogle Ads · Microsoft Ads · Feed Management · Call Tracking
We started by collecting closed phone deals from the client and matching them back to our campaigns by hand. Then we installed WhatConverts, which tracks every call to the campaign, ad group and keyword behind it.
It changed which campaigns we backed. One campaign that looked weak on ecommerce ROAS turned out to drive most of the phone leads. On the old reporting we would have cut it. The call center also closes at weekends, so we pulled bids down on Saturdays and Sundays and moved that money into the weekdays, when someone was there to answer.
The custom build couldn’t output product variants, so we asked for the whole product database out of Magento and went looking for a pattern. We found one in the URL slugs, built the variant URLs from it, and handed the developers the logic to put straight into the feed. Every size and color became a product Google could show.
From there we ran the feed through DataFeedWatch.
Along the way, Merchant Center flagged price mismatches between the site and the feed. We traced each one back to the data layer and worked through the fixes with the developers until the feed ran clean.
Inside the business, nobody says “Search campaign 4”. They say railing systems are up this week and decking boards are down. So we built the campaigns and ad groups on the same product types the client’s team uses internally, and mirrored them in the feed.
Standard Shopping replaced Smart Shopping, and we moved trademark searches out of Dynamic Search Ads into a campaign of their own. Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Dynamic Search Ads covered each product type, and new product lines from the biggest brands got dedicated campaigns when they launched. When the client’s report said railing was down, we could pull back there and push harder where things were moving.
Nobody builds a deck in the middle of winter. Spring and summer carry the year, and in the coldest months the budget dropped to around a fifth of its summer level. During the off-season we put most of the money into the warmer states, where people keep building. When lumber prices jumped across the US, product prices went with them for every retailer at once. We held steady and changed nothing, because there was nothing in the account to fix.
We imported the Google structure into Microsoft Ads and managed it on manual CPC, at around a tenth of the Google Ads daily budget. The Dynamic Search Ads campaign did better there than anything else on the platform.
With calls counted, the account could finally scale on the whole business. High-season budgets grew with it, and the phones got busy enough that the client hired 20 more people for the call center to keep up.
Within 2 to 3 months of switching on call tracking, the campaigns had generated more than 5,000 phone leads, and 60.5% of all the leads the call center received came from paid media.
I’ve always been a steadfast advocate for the agency. They have consistently demonstrated exceptional performance and have always met and exceeded their objectives.
Head of Sales
US decking & railing retailer
Valentinas
Pay Per Click
Ran Google Ads and Microsoft Ads day to day, cracked the variant pattern in the Magento data, and joined the weekly call with the client.
Micky
Pay Per Click
Oversaw the account and its strategy across Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
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.
