How to skyrocket Google Ads profitability and get 10.78 ROAS as a local business with a small budget

Ever wondered how cool it would be if your investment 10x’d every month?

That’s basically what happened over the course of the month of september 2021 to a local pre-cooked meals business that I work with.

And they have been breaking new sales records week after week.

Armed with Google Ads and 971.21$ in ad spend, the campaign generated 10,470.50$.

Google Ads ROAS
Google Ads ROAS

That’s a whopping 10.78 ROAS and is ultra-profitable for them.

*Insert astounding move gif here*

Here is how we got to the results and how the campaign is structured for maximum results.

How we got 10.78 ROAS with Google Ads

Here is exactly how these results have been possible. This includes:

  • The Google Ads campaign structure
  • The copy
  • The tests

Campaign structure

Now, the truth is, in order to obtain high ROAS, campaign structure is not really important.

However, have you ever ran across the house or appartment trying to find your damn keys when you were already running late to an important meeting even though you swore you always put them at the same exact place? Yeah…

And just like that, your campaign structure becomes less of a luxury and more of a necessity to be effective. It makes it easy to manage all aspects of a campaign by knowing where everything is at all times.

So indirectly, campaign structure is important. And here is how ours are usually structured.

FYI: Our client’s goal is to promote ready to eat vacuum-packed meals.

At the campaign level

Goal of the campaign: To best represent the product or service you are selling and control targeting and ad spend.

In our case, our campaign is named: Vacuum-sealed meals

Note: This could be even more precise in our case, like per meal type. This particular client did not want to have the campaigns updated every week based on their weekly changing menu, so we settled on a higher-level name and theme and still get great results.

At the ad group level

Represents each type of individual variation or search query with many ad groups containing.

In our case, we have the following 4 ad groups active for september 2021: Prepared meals, Pre-cooked meals menu, Delivered pre-cooked meals (because they offer delivery) and Vacuum-sealed meals.

Each of these ad groups has the exact ad group name single keyword or multiple tightly themed keywords.

Note: We could add many more ad groups. However, based on our previous tests, these are the 4 best converting ad groups and the 1k$ / month allocated budget reaches only 36% of searches. This means that these ad groups could even be scaled up a bit, so no use in diluting the budget elsewhere for the time being given the results.

At the ad level

As for the ads, since every ad group is either a single keyword (SKAG) or a single theme ad group (STAG), ads are always highly relevant to the ad group.

We always have at least 2 ads running side by side.

We like to play with different themes for both ads. One could be about “Get the best X now” and the other more about “Top rated X in Y city”. Create headlines and make them go head to head.

If you are running ads and only have 1 ad for a possible outcome, you are difinitely leaving money on the table.

By ad optimiziation alone, we often 2x to 50x previous results.

Since ads are the first contact a potential customer has, the copy is very important in order to make it work and will greatly affect your results.

Google ads CTR
Google ads CTR

As an example, for this campaign, our average CTR is over 18%. This means that our ads are highly relevant and lots of people are clicking.

Apparently, the average CTR for Google Ads is 1.9%. So with almost 10x the average, it seems like our optimizations are paying off nicely.

This may however differ if you want to control ad spend for different ad groups, since ad spend control is at the campaign level.

I like to follow the SKAG (single keyword ad group) methodology, since it makes it easy to hyper-target and deliver an ad that is ultra relevant to a search. However it does happen that we go for STAG (single theme ad group) when we want to test multiple very similar themed keywords quickly.

Landing page

The landing page is soooooo often overlooked.

In our case, all ads go to an interactive menu that prompts the person to add meals to their cart.

It is not a downloadable PDF menu or an HTML static menu where the person needs to call in to order.

Rather, the friction is reduced to the max. Prices are clearly visible and adding items to the cart is easy.

The purchase can take place right there without talking to anyone. It’s as simple as adding the menu items they like, adding to cart and then purchasing on the spot.

It’s also a great opportunity for upsells and cross-sells with no additional overhead.

Results

As mentioned previously, the results are of 10.78 ROAS with around 1,000$ per month in Google Ads spend.

Here is the complete breakdown of the campaign data and results:

Google Ads campaign results - september 2021
Google Ads campaign results – september 2021
  • Ad budget: 1,000$ / month
  • Conversions: 120 sales
  • ROAS: 10.78
  • CTR: 18.12%
  • Conversion rate: 4.04%

Pretty good results if you ask me. Would you be happy with this?

Challenges

The challenge with this particular campaign comes from the nature of their business, which is pre-cooked meals.

This means that we have to target the ideal customer using common problems they are facing and position the ad messaging accordingly so it is highly relevant. This makes people click and more importantly, purchase.

Future plans

Now that we are getting good data and ultra-positive ROAS, we will follow-up with our client to see if they can manage more sales through this campaign.

The challenge here is the capacity limit they have since they work with food and have high overhead.

The road ahead is bright for them and I am blessed to be able to follow and assist them on their journey!

I will keep this post updated as more results roll in.

See ya soon!

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