Wine Central

Wine Central is an online alcohol retailer that sells 100’s of different varieties of wine, beer, and spirits throughout New Zealand. They came to Fabric because they were managing their own AdWords and Google shopping campaigns and quickly discovered that they were spending countless hours creating and optimising their campaigns with little result.

A campaign that needed reviving

Before Fabric started looking after their Google Ads management and optimisation, Wine Central were yielding roughly 1:2 on their PPC investment. For every $1 spent, they were receiving $2 in return. When taking into account margins, shipping costs and administration fees, the campaign was heading down an unprofitable path. Fabric determined that there needed to be at least a 1:3 return on investment for the campaign to make financial sense.

In the first month

In the first month of the campaign management, Fabric took a conservative and calculated approach to optimising the campaign by making incremental changes and measuring how they affected performance. Making small changes and measuring how these changes affected the campaign allowed Fabric to get a feel for specific technicalities of the campaign whilst mitigating the risk of changing anything too drastically. Fabric managed to reduce the cost per transaction by 30% and increase overall revenue generated by PPC by over 40%. This was done by removing all irrelevant keywords, phrases and products that were driving traffic but were driving little or no revenue.

Reducing the Max CPC for keywords drove more traffic and conversions

The shopping campaign had bids on products that were too high and were eating through budget. Fabric adjusted the bids to the lower max CPC to ensure Wine Central were getting more traffic and conversions at a cheaper price.

The most common misconception Fabric encounters with their customers is the that the higher the bids are in an AdWords campaign, the higher the position will be and therefore more conversions obtained. However, this is not always the case.

Bidding too high on any PPC campaign will result in burning through budget faster whilst still getting the same amount of conversions. Sitting in position number one consistently on the PPC SERP page is not always a good thing.

Second month was time to make massive changes

Once Fabric completed the first month of testing, the path on what needed to be optimized was clear.  Fabric began breaking the ad group into SKAG’s (single keyword ad groups).  The SKAG’s increased ad relevance and a produced a higher quality score – allowing Fabric to achieve the same result for a cheaper cost per click and ultimately, a cheaper cost per transaction.

Fabric also ran a 50/50 campaign experiment. One with an eCPC bidding strategy, and the other with a target CPA bidding strategy. After letting the campaign run for two weeks it was determined that the most effective strategy was CPA bidding and Fabric migrated the full budget over to this strategy.

Advanced customer segmentation and targeting

Fabric also extracted data from the Google Ads portal that showed specific demographic groups that had a higher probability of having the highest transaction value. These metrics showed micro user signals such as gender, interests, average income and age range. 

By analysing this data, Fabric was able to set bid modifiers in place for over 50 different combinations of demographic data. Bidding low or completely removing a combination that had CPA that was outside the agreed value, and bidding higher on the combination that had a higher probability of completing a high value transaction within the agreed CPA.

By the third month the campaign had sky rocketed

In the third month, the fruits of Fabric's labour showed face. We achieved an ROI of 1:10 (for every $1 spent, $10 returned).

Wine Central’s return on ad spend increased by 141%.  Fabric’s optimisation efforts decreased their average cost per transaction by 56% and reduced their overall monthly spend by 214%. How’s that for bang for your buck!?

Summary