A young pet accessories brand was selling in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, up against cheaper products that look much the same. Midsummer Agency put its tracking on solid ground in 2021 and let Google Shopping show off the quality.
PPCAnalyticsFeed Management
The client designs and makes accessories for dogs and the homes they share, using premium, pet-friendly materials. It launched its first product in December 2020, sells direct from a Shopify store, and grew up on Facebook, where most of its marketing ran.
A few things make the account demanding.
Google Ads was covering brand searches, with room to do much more. The client came to us in September 2021 to make Google a real second channel.
The client wanted 2 things: hit a set return on ad spend, then raise the monthly budget step by step to build the brand while sales grew. In a market full of cheaper alternatives, it also wanted shoppers to feel the quality before they ever reached the site.
Across Google Ads, Google Analytics and Merchant Center, we saw 4 clear opportunities.
For a brand that sells on how its products look and feel, the biggest opportunity was getting product images into Google’s results, backed by data that showed which clicks turned into sales.
We started with Web Analytics, because every later decision depended on numbers we could trust. Then we built Pay Per Click from the bottom of the funnel up: Shopping first, where buyers are closest to a sale, then search, remarketing and new markets.
ServicesConversion Tracking · Google Analytics
Most of the paid traffic was landing in Analytics as “direct”, and the store’s own domain and PayPal were showing up as referrers, which handed them credit for sales that Google Ads had earned. We fixed the property in our first week.
With clean data coming in, we tracked spend, sales and ROAS day by day in a shared tracker feeding Data Studio, and walked the client through it in weekly, then biweekly, update calls.
ServicesGoogle Ads · Feed Management
A premium product needs to be seen, and Google Shopping is where people see it. We built a product feed from scratch, with rewritten titles, fuller descriptions and the best photos leading each listing. We added product highlights, set up return policies and shipping in Merchant Center, and turned on free listings.
We then launched Shopping in a granular structure, with brand and non-brand searches split, and grouped similar products so each group got its own bids. Once Shopping showed which products converted, we used that data to grow non-brand search.
We tightened the existing account first. We built a global negative keyword list, replaced the extensions with new sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets and price extensions, and restructured the brand campaigns by match type. In October we moved every campaign into a fresh Google Ads account, switched off auto-applied recommendations and automatic ads, and added our standard monitoring scripts.
We created audience lists in the first week and applied them across the account. We then added:
For Black Friday we loaded the full catalog into the feed, matched sale prices to the store’s offers, and launched promotion and sitelink extensions for the collection. In December we swapped the evergreen ads for shipping-cutoff copy, queued gift ads to switch on automatically, and added non-brand search campaigns for individual products.
Brand campaigns covered the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand from October. In late November we opened Canada with its own feed priced in Canadian dollars, plus Shopping and Dynamic Search Ads. By December Shopping was running in the UK and Australia too, each with its own bids and targets.
In early 2022 we narrowed the focus to the bestseller, cut the Smart Shopping campaigns and reopened standard Shopping in every country, which gave us back control of bids market by market.
Shopping moved the numbers fast. Google Ads sales more than doubled in the first month, from 55 in September 2021 to 128 in October, as better images and descriptions drew clicks from people ready to buy. Over the first 3 months, ROAS rose 97%.
Black Friday month went further, with 221 Google Ads sales in November 2021. ROAS held at 4.1 in both October and November, above the target the client set us.
They know how to create engaging, catchy, and professional ads. They also helped me increase my sales by using Google Ads correctly.
The CEO
Pet accessories brand
Micky
Pay Per Click · Web Analytics
Led the audit, rebuilt the Google Analytics setup, and owned reporting and the update calls with the client.
Francesca
Pay Per Click
Shaped the setup, launch and expansion plan, then ran bidding across Shopping, Dynamic Search Ads and remarketing.
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.
