Note: Sr. Account Strategist Emily Spaeter also contributed to this post.

Early this year, we took over paid search and shopping campaigns for a jewelry retailer. Our goals weren’t strictly focused on direct response; the client was looking to use the offseason to establish performance expectations and build awareness for its line of engagement rings that we could convert later in the year, when intent would be higher.

Six months later, not only had we established performance standards and built a groundswell of awareness, we had achieved a revenue increase of 56% from the preceding six months, which was the retailer’s high season.

So what did we do – and what can you learn from the approach?

1) Don’t stick to Google’s recommendations.

Google loves pushing its Performance Max campaigns, particularly for retailers. While we did want to leverage Performance Max to find customers who weren’t necessarily searching for our focus keywords, we also wanted to maintain more control than the fully automated campaigns offered. We used a combination of traditional search campaigns, shopping campaigns that afforded us more control of bidding and targeting, and Performance Max campaigns to find and engage audiences to convert either in the short term or later in the year.

2) Brick-and-mortar presence? Enhanced Conversions are your friend.

We used Google’s new Enhanced Conversions reporting feature, which integrates offline sales activity into Google’s back end to train the algorithm more about valuable user profiles. It also gives us a more complete performance picture for the campaigns and allowed us to assign value to engagement that drove in-store traffic.

Not only did Enhanced Conversions help us understand (and convey to the client) more data about search and social campaign ROAS, it helped us understand where we could invest with confidence and drive more scale within the client’s goals.

3) There’s no such thing as too much research.

For our high-volume shopping campaign keywords, we leaned into competitive research and competitive positioning. Our client’s products are both high end and sustainably produced, and finding the messaging and keywords that helped capitalize on this combination was key to driving campaign performance.

4) Affiliate placements don’t cannibalize – they augment.

While our search and shopping campaigns were gaining momentum, our affiliate team was working with our content partners to earn placements that, among other benefits, ranked well organically for key queries related to engagement rings. The third-party clout this gave our client helped bolster its reputation as a sought-after engagement brand, which provided extra purchasing juice to user activity in related search and shopping campaigns.

Overall, the scale we were able to achieve in the offseason, and the foundational use of advanced data to measure true ROAS, has both DMi and the client anticipating a watershed finish to 2024.