Case Study

Milworks

INDUSTRIES: B2C + Ecommerce x Retail
MARKET: United States

Milworks is a curated selection of rugged yet refined, quality Men’s Goods. They are based in the Historic Third Ward, Milwaukee, Wisconsin and sell across the United States.

The Numbers You Care About

4x

Scale in Spend

9x

Increase in Revenue

33%

Decrease in CPA

2x

ROI

Our Role and Process

Milworks came to us in the summer of 2021 looking to grow the business. They had a similar challenge to other brands at the time, “How do we sell more products online profitably, while also making sure the retail business remains a key distribution channel?”

Milworks carry many well known premium brands carried by a range of competing ecommerce sites, which means competition is fierce.

So to profitably scale ad spend and revenue we first leveraged the data we had in Google Analytics, shopping campaigns, shopping feeds and what we know as Shopify Partners and Experts.

We started with an account audit which included auditing their shopping feed and Google Analytics. Our main goal was to look for opportunities and also start to understand what our bestsellers were, also known as hero products.

When a retail store sells 40 different brands and thousands of SKUs, it’s not possible and often highly unprofitable to run ads for everything, especially when you have a budget cap. You need to focus on your best opportunities to win the click.

So once we identified the hero products. This allowed us to do our shopping feed optimization work, building out a new custom shopping feed. We find that 80% of the work in scaling shopping campaigns and performance max is done in the shopping feed. This is also where we gain an edge, as most brands at their scale will ignore the shopping feed work.

While this shopping feed work was being done, we also worked with Milworks to streamline their Shopify store by:

Removing broken site links
Updating photos and creative assets
Improving website positioning. e.g. make it clear to visitors we sell men’s clothing
Hard coding GA4 into the site

Additionally, we made other recommendations to help with CRO and get more visits to convert – especially on mobile.

Platforms Used

Once this foundational work was done, it became a lot easier to scale ad spend and revenue. We use search and shopping campaigns where it made sense.

Successfully transitioning from Google’s smart shopping over to performance max was another hurdle overcome. Given the black box nature of performance max marketers have often stumbled when it comes to optimizing these campaigns.

One solution we utilized was to install Mike Rhodes pMax charts script. The script enabled us to better understand where the budget was being spent and which asset groups were performing the best. Allowing us to create new opportunities inside and outside of performance max.

Campaign diversification was also a part of our overall strategy, beyond search, shopping & performance max, we also successfully launched discovery ads ahead of Q4 to generate additional brand awareness for Black Friday.

The result: with a limited set of creative resources we generated a significant amount of traffic, incremental revenue was generated at the time, but the final result was our best Q4 to date, beating even our own increased projections.

Channel diversification was our final step. We took our learning’s from Google Ads and used this as a base to launch Microsoft Ads. Achieving profitable growth on multiple channels should be the goal. As the proverb goes, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.