How We Created an AdWords Campaign with a 400% ROI for a Dropshipping Store: Detailed Guide

When a dropshipper needs to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, one of the main metrics is ROI (return on investment). AdWords ROI is a figure showing the profit you’ve made from your ads compared to the amount of money you’ve spent on them. To calculate ROI, take the revenue from your ads, subtract your overall costs, and divide the difference by your overall costs. So, ROI formula is the following: ROI = (Revenue — Cost of goods sold) / Cost of goods sold.
What is the key factor of a webstore’s success? It is certainly the traffic, especially the quality traffic providing high conversions. Promoting our own stores, we try to test all possible traffic sources, and then focus on those that convert better.
We’ve been testing Google AdWords for a long time figuring out an optimal strategy, and after trying hundreds of keywords, ads and budgeting variants, we finally came to an extremely effective strategy with a 400% ROI in AdWords which is a great result for this traffic source.
Today we are pleased to share this “Huge ROI” AdWords strategy and give all the details:
The work was done in two steps:
- Search campaign
- Remarketing campaigns
How to increase ROI in AdWords Search Campaign
Ad groups and keywords
Before setting the campaign we carried out an analysis: what webstore items are the most popular and frequently sold. Google Analytics had already been installed on the website, so we could easily define the most visited pages and figure out the bestsellers — product pages with maximum conversions.

The following items were chosen:
- https://worldofharry.com/hermione-time-turner-necklace/
- https://worldofharry.com/golden-snitch-necklace/
- https://worldofharry.com/harry-potter-lightning-glasses-t-shirt/
- https://worldofharry.com/womens-leviosa-print-t-shirt/
- https://worldofharry.com/harry-potter-hogwarts-scarf/
- https://worldofharry.com/harry-potter-golden-snitch-bracelet
- https://worldofharry.com/hogwarts-sweatshirt/
- https://worldofharry.com/potter-magic-wand
- https://worldofharry.com/lightning-glasses-sweatshirt-4-colors/
Keywords were selected for each bestseller and united into ad groups. For example, several groups were formed for this item: https://worldofharry.com/harry-potter-hogwarts-scarf.
Keywords for the “Hogwarts Scarf” group:

Keywords for the “Gryffindor Scarf” group:

Etc.
For the items with few keywords only one ad group was created.

Ads
Two ad templates were written for each item:


Quite soon it became obvious that CTR grows significantly if a discount rate is indicated in the headline, so only the first template was left.

We duplicated the items names (the keywords) in the Path field, so that they were highlighted in the ad text to draw more attention.

We added extensions for the whole campaign:
Additional links:

Refinements:

Results
After a time we analyzed the ad groups performance and switched off the ones with low CTR and poor conversions. Finally we kept only items, keywords and ads that provided the highest sales from this advertizing channel.
High ROI in AdWords with Remarketing Campaigns
Along with the search campaign we set the following Audiences in Google Analytics:
Visitors who’ve spent 30+ seconds on the website
Visitors who’ve spent 20+ seconds on the pages of the specified items
Separate remarketing campaigns were created for both Audiences (for the whole webstore and for the bestsellers).
Ads
Text ads and banners for graphic ads were created for every remarketing campaign.
A text ad for the whole website looked as follows:

These text ads were copied from the relevant search campaigns:

Banners for graphic ads were created in 8 sizes: 468*60, 160*600, 336*280, 250*250, 120*600, 300*250, 200*200, 728*90.


All banners included the following:
- Image (the product or the movie heroes)
- Discount rate
- Item price (for the banners with specific products)
- “Shop now” button
- Webstore name (otherwise Google would not approve the ad)
The most popular graphic ad format is 300*250 — it brings maximum conversions. Text ad format is the second in the list.

Since the remarketing has shown the best effect (3 sales in the very first day), now we gradually add such campaigns for all the webstore’s popular products.
Our Results in Google Adwords
We discovered a great potential of Google Adwords that we’d underestimated before. It’s not an easy or cheap traffic source, but it turns really effective when smartly used.
At the moment the cost per click (search campaign) comprises around $0,14 which is a very low price taking into account that we target people searching Google for a particular product and that we indicate the product price right in the ads. It is low click cost combined with thorough targeting that makes it possible to pay our AdWords expenses four times.
So, AdWords ROI is probably the most significant marketing measurement for dropshippers since it shows the real impact of AdWords for your business. We hope this example will help you in your dropshipping business experience and you’ll share your own success story with us.
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Originally published at alidropship.com.
