About Logs Online

Logs Online were a brand new business created in spring 2020, founded by entrepreneurs with a background in fuel and energy. Taking their business initially to channels such as Amazon and eBay, the client quickly realised that they wanted to invest in direct sales through their website and saw Google Ads as a great way to do this.

Why Logs Online Wanted To Work With an Agency

Whilst the founders of Logs Online are experienced entrepreneurs with a great understanding of online businesses and even channels like Google Ads, they recognised that they could excel their business and sales further by employing experts to manage it for them. Maley Digital took on the account in late May 2020 and immediately set to work.

Where were the opportunities within the account?

The owners themselves had done a great job of setting up campaigns and the account was already profitable at the point we had taken it over, it was a case of maximising all possible sales for budget, so here are the steps that we took;

• The campaigns in the account were missing some keyword opportunities and weren’t split optimally with multiple keywords in the same ad group that weren’t hugely relevant to each other.
• All campaigns were using manual CPC, which is what we advise for most campaigns initially. However, upon gathering data on conversions from running the campaigns we quickly took to experimenting with other bidding strategies, specifically Target CPA and Maximise conversions which we have seen great results from for other clients where there is sufficient sales data.
• The existing shopping campaigns were using standard shopping and the client hadn’t yet trialled Smart Shopping. Again, whilst this isn’t incorrect, we saw split testing smart shopping versus the performance of the standard shopping campaign as an opportunity, which lead to a higher rate of sales and a better cost per sale too.
• The account used only generic keywords and didn’t mention specific locations. From our keyword research, we had noticed that there is an appetite for local log delivery as many people aren’t aware of national log delivery services such as Logs Online. We therefore set about creating a GEO campaign which targeted nearly every town in the UK and Ireland by name, for example +Logs +(location) to help generate sales for this audience. This was a great expansion to the existing campaign set and increased the scope.
• The client had also created some great video material for promotion across their social media channels and hadn’t realised that you can utilise Google Ads to promote marketing videos through YouTube. We suggested this to the client and have since been retargeting all website visitors as well as relevant audiences and demographics to expand our scope beyond search and shopping alone.
• Since starting with he client in the Spring we have been through a couple of seasons now where the weather has fluctuated and naturally has had a varying effect on the popularity of the clients various products. Proactively, we have ensured that we have been able to adjust for this demand by making sure that seasonal products have had full impression share during their busiest periods, specifically with the charcoal, BBQ and fire pit style products being very popular from June to August, and as we crept into September and October the Logs have become significantly more popular, for which we have adjusted the budgets between the campaigns to maximise sales and conversion value for the client.

The results

We are yet to even enter Winter at the time of writing this case study (October 2020), however are already able to report on excellent results that are currently increasing exponentially as the temperatures have dropped in October. Here are the stats we have achieved up until 1 October, starting from scratch as a new business in May;

• 2% conversion rate from Google Shopping
• 1.5% conversion from search
• 680% average ROI from shopping
• 560% average ROI from search
• Higher average order value than other channels such as Amazon (unfortunately we cannot disclose exact figures due to client confidentiality).

October to date, we are currently achieving a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) of over 750% with impressions and clicks increasing significantly due to temperatures dropping and demand for logs increasing. We expect to be able to improve on this significantly as we head deeper into winter and are working closely with our client to maximise sales and profit from their budget.