Ski Monster – Business Summary
The Ski Monster® is a 10+ year old American enterprise focused on reconciling a huge market gap in the retail experience for skiers and snowboarders. They have grown to become well known in the industry and famous for caring that their customers find the right winter gear.
Their crew is made up of people who actually use the gear they sell, so every recommendation comes from firsthand experience.
It’s a very seasonal business, obviously. The client has invested a fair amount of marketing budget into their online presence, as well as some basic SEO before approaching us.
But the challenges with their product data in the Google Merchant Center and their outdated Google Ads campaigns have pushed them against the wall. Logic Inbound to the rescue!
THE CHALLENGES
The client was very transparent about their history, requirements, expectations, past failures and dubious decisions:
The client had prepared a shortlist of products they need to be ranking better for. There were less than 30 top priority products to advertise for, which made our Google Ads optimizations easier as well.
Switching to Shopify from WordPress last year has been the “best decision” they made in terms of making their online life and transactions easier.
However, Shopify comes with its own challenges and requirements, and it comes with a price tag, as well. The platform’s quirks include:
- A specific site architecture,
- More difficulties optimizing page speed
- Customizing the user experience,
- Plugin limitations
- A need for frequent checkups on the health of product pages.
What we were dealing with the Merchant Center was a whole other story, though:
13000+ disapproved products!
Missing required attributes: age group, gender, GTIN/MPN where applicable.
Missing image link issues (7,000+ products impacted).
“Unable to view store on desktop” issue for 117 products (URL access errors).
One big fear our client had was that they wouldn’t get results (ROI) fast enough!
Simply put, they had their own offline problems and waited until things started to get progressively worse before asking for help – this is why so many deprecated and disapproved products were reported in the Merchant center!
We knew we had to be quick and without hesitation when it came to fixing obvious issues!
OUR STRATEGY & PROCESS
We know that cleaning up your Google Merchant Center data directly improves the performance and efficiency of your Google Ads Shopping campaigns in several key ways:
Improved Ad Relevance: Accurate and high-quality product data (e.g., correct titles, descriptions, prices, availability) helps Google display your products to the most relevant audiences searching for those specific items, which often leads to higher click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates.
Reduced Suspensions: Google enforces strict data quality standards. Cleanup ensures all product information adheres to these guidelines, minimizing item disapproval or even account suspension, which is crucial for maintaining a healthy ad account.
Better Ad Ranking and Visibility: Google’s algorithms favor merchants providing excellent data quality. Better data can lead to higher ad rankings and increased visibility for your products within Google Shopping results.
Enhanced Performance Reporting: Clean data provides more accurate insights, allowing you to better optimize your ad spend and campaign strategies.
Optimizing the Google Ads campaigns was a separate process – we have more than a decade of experience with this and keep our knowledge up-to-date so there were no issues with split testing, acquiring negative keywords for filters, and so on.
It was an overwhelming workload; at the end of it all, there were 13000+ disapproved products removed from the feed. Overall traffic has seen a significant increase, driven primarily by a surge in paid ad clicks.
RESULTS
Once Google knew they could trust the site being up-to-date, that’s when all the effort around building usable structured data started to pay back in dividends!
Total clicks have nearly doubled, increasing by +98.1% to 56.70K.
The Ads channel has been the primary driver of this growth, with a recent spike in clicks that has surpassed their Organic traffic. This is looking at the same date range, of course:
The Merchant Center is comfortably sitting at 0 unresolved issues, such as unapproved products or missing image links. A big win after a massive amount of work done cleaning all the errors up!
CONCLUSION
The Ski Monster has been through a hell of a ride in the past year, and we are lucky to have been given the opportunity to make that ride end up in great success, rather than a disaster.
Brands like this are hard to find these days, and we definitely need more people like the leaders of this company. Our clients have been ready from the get-go to help us help them!
Every meeting was productive, reasons for every action were clear, and every plan was executed to perfection. Our services with Ski Monster expanded from a simple audit, to PPC campaign optimizations and Merchant Center cleanup, as well as Facebook Ads optimizations which came as soon as they saw good results from the initial consultations and audit we had done.
To add to that, we did technical website optimizations and included more functionalities to their website which resulted in:
- Amazingly precise KPI tracking and attribution,
- Better reputation management (Reviews)
- A streamlined customer experience throughout the buyer funnel!
If you like how that sounds, give us a call or fill out the discovery form on our website!
Call us at: (206) 800-7756 or, email vlad (at) logicinbound.com to get started today!