How to increase ecommerce ROAS by at least 30%
Tanel Vetik
Head of strategy
Do you have a feeling your ecommerce marketing campaigns have plateaued? They most likely have. Most do, actually – rather sooner than later. The most common symptoms are dropping ROI (Return On Investment) for ad spend, steady fall in impression share and top of page positions, and the infamous rise in CPC (Cost Per Click).
You probably tried changing up the campaign bidding strategy but didn’t see the desired improvements. It’s usually the first thing marketing managers tweak after getting told to either start getting good results again or their budget would be cut.
To be honest with you there are no easy solutions to this. It’s likely one of three reasons why your Google Ads or Facebook Meta Ads are dropping in performance. Either your competitors levelled up their strategy, your target audience have shifted their values away and your ad copy no longer captures them, or your campaign setup is restricting your ad performance (e.g. when your adverts are misconfigured or you keywords have run all over the place).
How to increase ecommerce ROAS by at least 30%
Tanel Vetik
Head of strategy
Do you have a feeling your ecommerce marketing campaigns have plateaued? They most likely have. Most do, actually – rather sooner than later. The most common symptoms are dropping ROI (Return On Investment) for ad spend, steady fall in impression share and top of page positions, and the infamous rise in CPC (Cost Per Click).
You probably tried changing up the campaign bidding strategy but didn’t see the desired improvements. It’s usually the first thing marketing managers tweak after getting told to either start getting good results again or their budget would be cut.
To be honest with you there are no easy solutions to this. It’s likely one of three reasons why your Google Ads or Facebook Meta Ads are dropping in performance. Either your competitors levelled up their strategy, your target audience have shifted their values away and your ad copy no longer captures them, or your campaign setup is restricting your ad performance (e.g. when your adverts are misconfigured or you keywords have run all over the place).
Do you have a feeling your ecommerce marketing campaigns have plateaued? They most likely have. Most do, actually – rather sooner than later. The most common symptoms are dropping ROI (Return On Investment) for ad spend, steady fall in impression share and top of page positions, and the infamous rise in CPC (Cost Per Click).
You probably tried changing up the campaign bidding strategy but didn’t see the desired improvements. It’s usually the first thing marketing managers tweak after getting told to either start getting good results again or their budget would be cut.
To be honest with you there are no easy solutions to this. It’s likely one of three reasons why your Google Ads or Facebook Meta Ads are dropping in performance. Either your competitors levelled up their strategy, your target audience have shifted their values away and your ad copy no longer captures them, or your campaign setup is restricting your ad performance (e.g. when your adverts are misconfigured or you keywords have run all over the place).
Your marketing campaigns are likely bleeding money
There’s no way you can (or should) continue this way. The whole point of having marketing campaigns is to bring more money into the business than they take away. If it’s bleeding your business dry then you need to take massive action right now. Like today now.
Perhaps you already know this and that’s why you’re reading my article here to get some new ideas on what to do. Before telling you what has helped me and our clients in the past, let me tell you a couple things you should NOT do:
- Don’t start adding new channels to the mix (I know a lot of people are talking about TikTok and how video ads are the new big thing, but if Google Ads worked for you in the past, then there is no reason they shouldn’t work today. First fix what works for you ad then you can start testing new shiny channels).
- Don’t panic. There’s a very rational reason why your marketing campaigns are performing poorly. Let’s figure this out one step at a time.
- Don’t hire a bozo marketing agency/consultant because they promised you the world. I know you might be a bit desperate to get things fixed ASAP, but don’t fall victim to unrealistic promises.
- Don’t pull the plug on your ads unless you’re out of marketing budget. There’s no reason to abandon ship just because the compass started acting up. Fix this and it’s smooth sailing from there on out again.
What we see other businesses do all the time
Marketing managers and business owners start looking for help generally when things are either coming crashing down in a budget burning mess, or when things are quiet no matter what they do.
With paid ads it’s more straightforward because 99% of the time it’s due to neglected campaigns and adverts. They launched these campaigns some time ago, nobody really optimised them, A/B tests weren’t followed up, and the stack of other things that needed attention was more important.
If your ecommerce marketing campaigns are neglected like this for longer periods of time, then the marketplace will punish you for this. Competitors will get ahead, your impression share will decrease, cost per lead will increase, and website engagement will suffer due to poor website traffic quality.
If you neglect your email marketing, then your mailing list will both forget you and you’ll probably stop sending emails. That could be a significant % of your business revenue gone. Only 1/3 of the businesses we start working with are using email marketing in their business growth strategies. It’s an incredibly powerful tool to use. Unfortunately, most business owners and marketing managers don’t have the time and resources to build these automations themselves.
It’s even worse if they hired a bozo marketing agency or “fake it ‘till you make it” freelancer who promised unrealistic results, only to screw things up ad disappear. Not only do you never get a refund with these guys, but you’ll also likely need to spend time or money fixing their mistakes.
What can you do today to fix your sales funnel
This depends on what you need to sort out. There’s most likely a data tracking issue that’s not letting you make data-backed accurate decisions. You’re trying this and that, but not really moving forward.
If this is the case, I recommend you install Google Tag Manager on your website. This will then allow you to properly install Google Analytics 4 on your website using the tag & trigger function of GTM. Next, install HotJar for accurate user engagement tracking, and social media tracking pixels (Facebook Meta Pixel, LinkedIn Insights Tag etc.). Consider using Looker Studio for data reporting and analysis.
If you’re managing an ecommerce business, then be sure to make use of dynamic campaigns that match user behaviour & interests with products on your website. For example, you can show them an advert of the exact same items they browsed but left behind.
When running paid shopping or standard ecommerce ad campaigns, you should have a dedicated person or dedicated hours per week to manage these ads. Without regular management they’ll run wild and your campaign performance noticeably drops. It could cost you more than half of your budget.
I recommend having multi-step marketing strategies that seamlessly cover all steps of the conversion funnel. Some platforms only target cold prospects, another campaign covers lower-funnel warm prospects, and other platforms to support the whole process by re-engaging the drop-offs.
This way you’ll have a predictably profitable marketing process that scales with your business.