AI-driven success: How Obsidian Digital used Producthero CSS to transform Cotonshoppen’s Google Ad strategy

Testing period: 15 May – 31 July ‘24 versus 27 January – 14 May ‘24

• Clicks: 25.82% increase
• Impressions: 36% increase
• Conversion Value: 25.97% increase
• Cost: 26.72% increase

Product feed challenges leading to an agency switch

Facing unresolved product feed issues with their previous agency, Cotonshoppen, a webshop specializing in high-quality dog supplies in Denmark, turned to Obsidian Digital for a solution. Obsidian’s proactive and efficient approach quickly addressed these problems, leading to significant improvements in Google Ads performance. Cotonshoppen was impressed with Obsidian Digital’s proactive and fast approach, so they hired them to get the most out of their Google Ads.

Next step: Boosting Google Ads campaigns by analyzing data

To get a thorough understanding of the Google Ads account, Obsidian Digital included PPC specialists Christoffer Sandau, Milos Kovacevic, and Mihajlo Tramosljika to apply a ‘six-eyes is better than two’ principle. Meaning that all the clients get double-checked on the strategy and implementation. As they primarily service e-commerce clients this enabled them to provide a thorough data analysis of the account of Cotonshoppen and discovered improvements for both the bidding, campaign structure, and product feed.

Bidding strategy: Google CSS & Profit on Ad Spend

The first step they took was bringing Cotonshoppen to the Google CSS partner, Producthero. This led to a reduction in the costs per click and increased the position of the shopping ads. Another step to improve the bidding strategy was to move Cotonshoppen from a focus on revenue to profitability. To do this Obsidian Digital implemented bidding on the profit on ad spend within the Google Ads account to adjust the bidding levels based on the profitability of products.

Campaign structure: Analysing product performance within Performance Max

To give insights into the performance of products the team at Obsidian used Producthero’s Labelizer. With the Labelizer they could see how Cotonshoppen’s products perform within Performance Max. Using Producthero’s Labelizer, Obsidian Digital helped steer Google’s AI to optimize the bids and placements to drive conversions and increase the conversion value.

The team at Obsidian Digital created four different segments for Performance Max:

• Heroes: The best-selling products that should get more ad budget.
• Sidekicks: Products with a good conversion rate, but not enough clicks.
• Villains: Products that get a lot of clicks, but don’t convert.
• Zombies: Products that simply don’t show on Google’s shopping window.

Next to creating these segments, Obsidian Digital also did a split test with the Villain and Zombie products to decide if they would run Standard Shopping or Performance Max. During the test, they put the villains on manual bidding and had a low bid as these products usually didn’t convert that well. As this was successful they then switched to a target ROAS objective for the Villains. For the zombies, they concluded that these products performed better with Performance Max. By separating these products they saw a huge increase in impressions.

Paula Jota Pedersen, Senior Buyer at Cotonshoppen: “We have experienced significant progress after partnering with Producthero. With a webshop like ours, and many product items, we have, especially after the start of the collaboration, managed to sell products that we previously had no success with. It has truly eased our resources and has become an indispensable partner in our digital toolbox.”

Product feed improvements: Adjusting title lengths

One step that Obsidian Digital took to increase the impressions of products was teaching Cotonshoppen how they could use Producthero to optimize the product content to get more impressions. Within Producthero Cotonshoppen created filters to optimise the titles of their best-performing products. This led to a huge increase in the visibility of the products.

“Next to leveraging Google’s AI solutions, at Producthero we integrated AI within our platform. This enables people to easily optimize their product content by simply adjusting or adding items to product titles, product types, and other attributes with the click of a button while maintaining control of the output.” Martijn Beumer, Chief Product Officer at Producthero.

Experience with Google CSS partner Producthero

Christoffer Sandau, PPC consultant at Obsidian Digital: “We offer Producthero as the Google CSS partner for all our retail clients as their customer service is great. For most webshops, we also apply these best practices and the experiences that we gathered by collaborating on multiple cases. However, we always analyze the accounts as many decisions also depend on the number of products, ad spend, business strategy, and the goals clients have. Overall, we are very happy with the Google CSS program and Producthero. Producthero helped on both a strategic level to design the campaign structure, as well as practically helping with the Merchant Center.”