From 3:1 to 6:1: How PPC Optimization Drives Results

HealthWarehouse.com is America’s leader in Digital Pharmacy. Their mission? Providing affordable pharmaceuticals and exceptional service nation-wide. To do this, their skilled team of professionals prioritize compassion, convenience, and transparency.

In April 2021, HealthWarehouse.com set big goals to expand their brand, reach more customers, and drive revenue growth — particularly through SEM, the company’s primary source of revenue.

Illustration of man shopping from an online pharmacy

The Problem: Unlimited Budget, But Limited Results

But HealthWarehouse.com needed help. By early 2020, their reliable SEM performance had shifted from steady to stagnant. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) averaged about 3:1, and they weren’t sure why their numbers were sinking. To propel their revenue forward in 2020 and meet growth goals for 2021, HealthWarehouse.com brought Big Sea onboard.

Big Sea took a deep dive into campaign analysis, which is how we uncovered structural issues that may have put some holes in the SEM strategy — namely internal bidding. Internal bidding is when different ad groups or campaigns use 2 or more of the same keywords. This can cause a brand to bid against itself, in turn raising the price of conversions. HealthWarehouse.com’s continuous optimizations weren’t resulting in optimal ROAS for the brand, so Big Sea knew they needed a stronger setup for their ongoing Google Search campaigns.

In the discovery process, Big Sea uncovered another problem: the campaign was struggling with how to spend the daily budget. In an attempt to drive more traffic, HealthWarehouse.com raised the cap on spending substantially — only, that didn’t fix the original problem. (A properly optimized campaign should have no trouble spending all of the daily budget.)

The good news? Big Sea’s deep dive brought all of these bugs to the service. Back on land, Big Sea set out to develop a strategy that enabled us to deconstruct the campaign and rebuild it for optimization without interrupting HealthWarehouse.com’s consistent ROAS.

The Solution? Keyword Optimization and Campaign Restructuring

The first step to optimizing HealthWarehouse.com’s SEM was keyword optimization. We ran every query you could think of to analyze profitability, with the goal of cutting spending to low-performing keywords and irrelevant terms for HealthWarehouse.com’s services and products. Then we eliminated duplicate and conflicting keywords across ad groups.

Now, the key to any high-performing SEM campaign is getting each campaign, ad group, and ad tailored to exactly what the searcher typed in. So our next task was restructuring HealthWarehouse.com’s ad groups based on common phrases. Finally, we created new ads to reflect those targeted keywords.

Right away, HealthWarehouse.com’s campaign saw a lower cost per conversion — but daily spending was still low and few of their tests were converting. This told Big Sea that Google couldn’t gather enough conversion data to bid effectively for these campaigns.

We devised a 4-week test: Let’s set daily budgets back to their original cap and switch each campaign to a “Maximize Conversion” bidding strategy. This fixed the spending issue, but it also raised the cost per conversion. Since the goal of our test was to gather more conversion data for each campaign, we were able to learn from those results and optimize back to a low cost per conversion and high ROAS.

The Results? Highest ROAS in History and Continued Success

HealthWarehouse.com’s campaign saw the highest ROAS in 18 months, going from 3:1 to 6:1. The average CPA before Big Sea was $14. After our optimizations, the CPA dropped to $11. Since the test increased spending to the full daily budget, Big Sea knew we’d optimized the campaign.

HealthWarehouse SEM Results

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