Shivam Kaushal

So I was working for one of the brands, which is a protein powder, a women's protein powder in India, and it was a starter. And they were running meta campaigns. However, they were not delivering the right results to us. So, what I did, I jumped into the data. I loaded the data for the last three months. And when I configured it, I saw that there were certain differences in categories where we were spending a lot, but we were not generating revenue. There were multiple creators where we were not even spending, but we had 20 creators in a single ad set. So, what I did, I reduced the spend on nonperforming products, and I scaled the campaigns where we were getting a positive ROAS, which resulted in an average ROAS improvement and increment. And then I generated catalog ads for the products that were not usually bringing us good conversions. So, for these kinds of optimizations, I got help from the data and improved the performance of the overall campaigns.

So there are a lot of metrics that demonstrate the impact of the optimization on the campaign's performance. So there was a time when we were experiencing creative fatigue. So that means the CTR was dropping pretty prominently. So we changed the creative, and we saw what our competitors were running, and then we leveraged that. In this scenario, we uplifted the creative by doing the right optimizations. Then we saw which type of audience was working for the campaign. Then we saw what the conversion rate was for that particular audience. And what we did, we improved the spend on those particular audiences where we were getting a better conversion rate. That eventually helped us to scale the campaigns and bring up positive revenue for the brands.

So what I do, I pick up data for the last three months, then I evaluate it for the last month, and then I break it down into 14 days and 7 days. And then I figure out which particular metric has seen a certain drop. Is it CBR, is it CPR, or is the CPM increasing? So these kinds of metrics I look at, and if CPM is increasing, that means the audience is getting skewed. If CTR is dropping, that means there's creative fatigue. If the conversion rate is dropping, that means we need to look at the optimization of the landing page, or we need to change the overall audience and improve that particular thing as well.

When I judge what optimization is most important, it's to analyze which type of keywords I'm bidding on. So we need to look at where I'm spending and where I'm getting a good number of conversions. There are a lot of times when I see that we're spending a lot on non-performing or non-converting keywords. So the very first thing is to pause them, then we have a look at the search term report, the search query report. We analyze what particular keywords we're getting conversions on. And then we pick those keywords from search terms and add them as negatives, add them as positives. We look at which keywords are not relevant to the brand, then we add those particular keywords as negatives. These are the basic optimizations for a search campaign. Then, we can do dynamic keyword insertion, we can do callout extensions and all that kind of stuff, like that. For Pmax, we usually work on creators. We work on audiences that we're working with. And for YouTube, we also work on the kind of creative and audience and content on which particular sites or displays we're working on.

Time when you're in a Google Ads campaign and it's not meeting the ROAS performance target. What steps would you take to dial in? Would you want to release in your audience? So there was a time when there was a Google Ads campaign where it was not meeting the ROAS target. What we did was look at the location report to see which locations we were delivering good ROAS. So what we did was launch location-specific campaigns to improve the overall revenue for the brand. Then we had specific product groups from GMC, and we ran only those products to analyze how those particular products would perform. And then we also checked the creatives, saw the CTR, and improved the audiences as well, which helped us improve the performance of the brand.

So it's very easy to implement the optimized optimization strategy once we are aware of what, once we get to read the data, we get to see what's working and what's not working. So if it's creativity, we leverage the creative change. If the CPM is high, we change the audience. If the CVR is dropped, then we block out those outbound clicks as well, and then we work on conversion rate optimization. These are the very basic things that we can do to implement the optimization strategy.

So beyond the metrics that are available into Google Ads, we leverage data from Google Analytics. We see wherever we're getting good engaged sessions compared to other channels. And if we're having good engaged sessions, that quality traffic is being directed to the website that will eventually help us convert the users coming to the website, and this is how we can improve the overall conversion rates for the brand.