Google Ads Recovery System
If your Google Ads account is stuck, underperforming or slowly bleeding money — this is for you.
We built a recovery system that’s turned brands around within 30 days.
You know that moment where you’re staring at your ROAS and wondering…
“What the hell happened?”
It used to work. Now it doesn’t.
Maybe it’s the strategy. Maybe your agency dropped the ball. Maybe you just got too busy to fix it.
This is the reality for a lot of 7-8 figure eCommerce brands.
Their Google Ads accounts didn’t break overnight…
But they’re definitely not scaling anymore.
That’s why we built a system called:
The 7-8 figure Google Ads Recovery System.
Here’s what’s within it:
Let’s jump right into it.
The Optimisation Checklist
You first need a baseline to work off, this will help you determine areas of opportunity within your account.
In saying so, here’s a link to the Google Ads optimisation checklist and framework.
Make a copy:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jVuXSaEZyuyxIBpSRbQA4ynAfyJ_Hex-vmP3EV7uLnE/copy
Now, get familiar with it.
The spreadsheet has 4 tabs, one for each campaign type:
- Search
- Display
- Shopping
- Remarketing
Each tab contains a mix of:
- Campaign build
- Recurring optimisations
- Bespoke optimisations
Here’s how these work:
- Campaign build: Required tasks to create campaign
- Recurring optimisations: Do these daily/weekly/fortnightly
- Bespoke optimisations: Do these monthly
This should help you pinpoint focus areas whilst giving you structure to continuously optimise your campaigns.
3-Phase Rebuild Framework
Note: This in combination with the optimisation framework will also help you cover (what to pause, what to fix and what to double down on).
Here’s an overview of the campaigns which are included within the 3-phase framework:
- DSA
- Search
- Shopping
Across brand and non-brand.
You can segment this a few ways depending on your brand, here’s how we did it for one of our clients:
- 4-tiered performance system
- Female and male
- Poor performers
Here’s a visual of how it looked:
Now:
The point of this section isn’t to walk you through all these campaigns types.
It’s to take you through the WHY, the selection process and reasoning.
The decision making and key considerations that made this campaign architecture come to life.
With that being said, if you want a run down of every campaign, you can get that here:
The $57.2M Google Ads eCommerce Guide.
Feel free to go through that first and then come back to this post.
Now, let’s get right into it!
Step 1: Category Selection
This is a critical decision to get right.
Before you even consider what campaign types to run.
You first need to answer a few key questions:
- How many products do you have?
- How should you segment the products?
- What’s your active demand per category?
- How much profit/revenue has each category generated?
For this type of decision making, when reviewing data, you ideally want to take a look at the last 12 months.
Now:
If you have less than 1,000 products, in the majority of cases, it’d be best to start with 2-4 segments.
Across all your products (not category specific), it’d look like this:
To keep this really simple and save you a lot of time and money…
Typically <200 products will start with a segmentation of:
- Superstar products (top performers)
- Benched products (poor performers)
201-600 products:
- Superstar products (top performers)
- A Player products (mid performers)
- Benched products (poor performers)
601-1,000 products:
- Superstar products (top performers)
- A Player products (mid performers)
- Reserve products (mid-low performers)
- Benched products (poor performers)
Why is this the case?
Campaign data consolidation.
To maximise campaign performance, you need to consolidate as much as possible (when you have <1,000 products).
The more data you give Google’s AI:
The better it becomes at optimising against your key conversion signals.
This also mitigates the need to delve too deep into active demand per category, that’s only relevant at high scale.
Step 2: Campaign Selection
Now when do we need to expand the campaign architecture?
- When you have 1,000s of products
- When you have clear categories that generate the most revenue
- When there’s so much volume and differentiation within each category that it makes sense to segment
The client we’re referring to in this post:
- Has well over 15,000 products
- Has 3 categories which generate the largest amount of revenue
- So much so in one category we needed to segment by male and female
- Why? There were clear differences in purchasing behaviour and frequency between these core groups (only evident within their strongest category)
For these reasons, you’ll now have a better understanding as to why the Shopping and Search campaigns look like this:
Shopping Campaigns
What we’ve gone through so far details the Shopping campaigns quite well.
However, this is super important to note:
Each category within Shopping got assigned a “Poor Performers” campaign to begin with.
Meaning any poor performer from its respective campaign would have been labelled as a poor performer and moved into a separate campaign.
Search Campaigns
Here are a few additional considerations to those already mentioned.
For the Search campaigns, they were initially only built for the brand’s T1 and T2 categories.
With budget limitations, we didn’t want to create too many campaigns and instead focused the resources on the highest performers across Search.
The above bucketing mentioned (Superstars, A Players etc.) works incredibly well for Shopping campaigns.
However for your Search campaigns, we recommend you take the same approach we did (if you have multiple categories).
Don’t group several categories into one Search campaign, give each distinct category it’s own Search campaign set.
Which should look something like this.
Note: Replace “Best Mattress” with your T1/T2 category to get an idea of how this would look for your brand.
DSA Campaign
Now why the DSA (Dynamic Search Ad) campaign?
Simple:
To target the rest of the products in Search.
Our dedicated Search campaigns were only targeting 20% of our client’s products.
What about the other 80%?
Instead of neglecting them, we created a DSA campaign.
We then built out additional targeted Search campaigns as required based on the DSA campaign data.
The best approach to DSA is to test them within your account.
You’ll be interested to know:
For some of our clients DSA outperforms Search and for other clients the opposite is also true.
The only way to really know what works in your account is to run controlled tests.
Step 3: Brand Vs Non-Brand
We don’t always run a dedicated brand campaign.
If your brand is fairly new, in most cases you won’t need branded campaigns as not many people are searching for your brand name within Google.
Instead it’s better to allow your branded search terms to be included within your non-branded Shopping and Search campaigns.
Why?
Because you need to build your conversion data within your campaigns.
When To Segment Brand & Non-Brand
When your branded conversions (within Shopping) is within the 25-50 range/month.
At this stage we’d recommend segmenting your Shopping campaigns into brand and non-branded.
When To Activate A Branded Search Campaign
When the branded conversions within your account reach 10-20/month.
At this stage you can create a branded Search campaign and assign a budget to it.
Important consideration: Limit your brands budget to 10-15% of your total budget.
For our client their branded conversions well exceeded the required thresholds.
In saying so, their branded campaigns were built right away.
Bonus: Get Started Today
All of this can be a lot of work, it also requires time and expertise to get it right.
If you need a hand with your Google Ads management, reach out we’d be happy to help.
"*" indicates required fields