How do you Google Ads a new premium Hair Care DTC brand?

We dived deep into the strategy on our coaching call yesterday, read on!

⏮️ But first, some context:

This is a new luxury hair care brand with 3x higher prices than their average competitors. No prize for guessing the advertising budget is small and the tROAS goal is 2x. 

The existing campaign setup comprises of 1 PMax full build, 1 brand search, and 1 video conversion campaign.

🧐The challenge?

Average ROAS less than 0.87, one or two sales per day.

Existing Campaigns?

- PMax full build - not performing at all

- Brand search - a no-brainer, working fine

- Standard shopping - didn't work, paused

- Non Brand search - didn't work, paused

- YouTube ads - on CPV, not hitting the tROAS goal

Now the Audit (on our coaching call yesterday): 

- Website: Looks great, but loads slow (Woocommerce)

- Shopping funnel: no checkout, only view cart button 

- Product pages: designed pretty well

- Product pricing: 2-3x the competitors

❓This leads to my questions: 

Q- Who are the ideal customers for these high-priced products? 

A- Women, primarily from metro cities (most conversions came from this), ideally high-income group

Q- Are the campaigns targeting only women from metro cities?

A- No, campaigns are targeting all of India, 10-40% income group, all genders

(Do you see the discrepancy here?)

Q- Why PMax? 

A- Because PMax tends to go towards identifying ideal customers (how wrong)

Q- What audience signals?

A- Combined: Search themes around hair care products, remarketing lists, and interests and demographics

Observation: Fewer conversions

Q- Why standard shopping was paused?

A- Because the search terms were not so relevant, conversions didn't occur

So far it sounds like the targeting was pretty generic, a lot of assumptions were made and therefore the results were substandard. 

Although we knew the target audience, the targeting was kept generic. 

And as long as this happens, no tool in Google Ads can help you save your campaigns. 

So, how do we get to them? Start with the following, in the same order:

1- Brand Keywords

2- Converted Search terms

3- Customer List

4- Website Visitors

5- Competitors' Add to cart URLs

6- Inbound Keywords

7- Optimized Targeting

8- Lookalike audience

9- Open targeting

Start with #7 onwards only when you've got a solid conversion history in your account and learning in your campaigns. 

Hope this helps!!