Background
Everyone knows car repairs can be outrageously expensive—even for something minor, like a scratch. TouchUpDirect exists to provide high-quality auto body touch up paint that gives consumers the ability to patch up their vehicle’s paint job without having to take their car to a professional. Based in Southern California, TouchUpDirect offers a color match guarantee on their paint and free shipping on all orders—making the company a great choice for people looking to fix a minor scratch or scuff on their vehicle for an affordable price.
Key Metrics
3.25x
Return-On-Ad-Spend
66%
Increase in Revenue
8,309
Conversions in One Month
Why’d They Come to LP?
TouchUpDirect sells their paint exclusively online, so a strong digital marketing strategy is crucial to the company’s success. The company had been outsourcing their pay-per-click (PPC) management to a digital marketing agency, but weren’t seeing the returns they’d hoped for. The paint supplier was having difficulty tracking sales in their Google Ads account; they wanted their account to be more organized and have a better structure to give them greater visibility. With their revenue goals in mind, TouchUpDirect partnered with Logical Position (LP) with the hope of growing their campaigns by 25% year-over-year (YoY).
What Strategy Was Used?
Wanting to start fresh, our paid search team built out new campaigns for TouchUpDirect on Google and Microsoft Ads, and launched them simultaneously. In recent months, Google has been fine-tuning their automation capabilities in their ad management platform. Our team capitalized on this by using a fully automated bidding strategy called target cost-per-acquisition bidding (TCPA) for our Google search campaigns. Instead of aiming for a certain return, this strategy allows our team to target a certain CPA for each sale. It places less emphasis on how much each cost-per-click (CPC) is—which can vary significantly each day, depending on Google’s ad auction—and instead focuses on how much each individual conversion costs, which enables the platform to spend more… when it’s worth it.
Our shopping ads use Smart Shopping campaigns, a campaign type that combines standard shopping campaigns with display remarketing. With Smart Shopping, Google’s machine learning uses TouchUpDirect’s product feed to create and show ads across different networks, including YouTube and Gmail. This is important because it allows for better budget flexibility to follow the customer journey and work leads down the sales funnel process.
On both Google and Microsoft, our team noticed that TouchUpDirect saw better performance on the search network, which is unusual for an eCommerce company. But think about it: TouchUpDirect’s customers are going to be looking for a specific type of car paint, and will perform a relatively exact search for it on Google—which search ads cater to better than shopping ads. Unlike our Google campaigns, our Microsoft campaigns utilize a manual bidding strategy. This ensures we are getting the best of both worlds; diversifying our bidding strategy helps our team constantly monitor what’s working the best for TouchUpDirect and make optimizations accordingly.
Once our partnership was well established, TouchUpDirect decided it was time to focus on an omni-channel strategy together with LP. Our team recommended Amazon Advertising to diversify their digital marketing mix. From there, our Amazon team built out Sponsored Product campaigns using keyword targets for TouchUpDirect’s two most popular products: touch-up pens, and touch-up aerosol sprays. Next, we built out a new type of campaign to run Sponsored Brand Ads on Amazon. This campaign type sends shoppers to category pages on TouchUpDirect’s Amazon store page; which increases overall brand engagement since consumers are able to see all of TouchUpDirect’s product offering instead of just a singular product. We’ve found that Sponsored Brand Ads increase the amount of time a consumer stays on TouchUpDirect’s Amazon page, which generates a stronger chance of a sale.
What Were The Results?
In just our first three months of working together, TouchUpDirect earned $79,000 more in revenue compared to the same time period the prior year, earning a 3.25x return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) for both Google and Microsoft.
In a year-over-year (YoY) comparison of one month of performance, TouchUpDirect’s revenue on Microsoft Ads increased by 66%—from $93,000 pre-LP to over $140,000 once we took over, a nearly $50,000 increase. That same month saw 8,309 conversions on Google Ads, for a total of $438,000 in revenue, far exceeding TouchUpDirect’s initial goal of growing their campaigns by 25%.
Our Amazon campaigns saw a great deal of success, too. TouchUpDirect had been seeing a 5.28x while running their Amazon Ads in-house; our team increased the ROAS to a 7.22x. TouchUpDirect’s revenue increased by 239% since we took over their Amazon management, resulting in an increase of over $230,000.
If your paid search campaigns could use a touch up, come directly to LP!
