If you're wondering whether or not Google Ads is still effective for eCommerce in 2025, I'm here to emphatically answer "YES, YES IT IS."
This post is about how we made all-time highs for a client in the Home & Decor space, even outselling their brick and mortar store for the first time ever.
8x YoY Revenue Growth, 9.5x Increase in Purchases, 300% ROASReturn On Ad Spend. The equation is Revenue From Ad Spend / Ad Spend.
They are a furniture company in New England that has historically relied on in-person sales at their storefront. We set them up with their online store and marketing in January 2023.
The ONLY marketing channel we utilized was Google Shopping.
We had been profitably running Google Ads campaign at a low spend of $1000-$1500 for several months as we proved out the Long-Term Value of their customers acquired via Google Ads.
We eventually found out that 25% of their customers returned within 3-6 months and purchased a cart of similar size ($150 AOV).
Armed with the knowledge that our overall ROAS was actually 3.125 compared to the apparent 2.5, we were able to present a case that Google Ads was a more profitable channel than it appeared to be.
Measuring your customer behavior "downstream" aka after-purchase is critical for eCommerce success.
The game really changed for us when the company restructured their leadership and we were told to test increasing their spend by 4X.
We began by doubling their spend for a month while we cycled through their product catalog searching for winners. We found a handful and created campaigns for each of those, organized by Brand.
Within a few weeks we had our winning product lines and started to push ad spend aggresively.
If you don't have enough conversion data, include Add to Cart & Begin Checkout, then manually optimize.
The first impact of the increase in ad spend (besides the obvious increase in traffic) was a lift in Shopping Behavior like Add To Cart, Begin Checkout, and On-site Search for the products we were featuring in the shopping campaigns.
When increasing Ad Spend, it's especially important to pay attention to the overall "lift" associated with the increase.
We also saw a lift in purchases that was proportional to our increase in spend, but not attributing to Google Paid channels in GA4.
This was our first roadblock. Do we trust the attribution of GA4, or trust our instincts that what we were doing was effective?
If a product that has never sold via your website suddenly has 200 Product Views, 40 Adds To Cart, and 20 Purchases, maybe it's your campaigns?
Measurement is as critical as ever and though we always strive for proven profitability, we decided to lower our ROAS goals to breakeven. We did this knowing that we would make it up and then some downstream when our customers returned to purchase again.
We were shifting gears from an efficency to volume model and had to cater the strategy to align with those goals.
In November and December we spent $14,000 and made $42,175 in Revenue and $10,635 in Potential Future Revenue.
That's a direct ROAS of 3.03 and 3.79 adjusted.
You may be thinking that Q4 shopping season was responsible for this success story, and that would be a good thought.
However, January is returning an 4 ROAS and YoY revenue is up proportionally to ad spend.
If you're struggling to see success on Google Ads, try zooming out and looking at the bigger picture and the relationships between changes to budget, traffic, and volume.