Background
GME Supply is America’s premier outfitter for fall protection, safety equipment, and gear for at-height workers and the construction industry. Their mission is to keep workers safe and productive on the ground. Founded in 2005, GME offers a complete line of lifting and rigging solutions in addition to fall protection equipment. Their customer service team, who GME calls Gear Experts, are knowledgeable and reliable; this, combined with GME’s extensive product inventory and same-day shipping, has made the company a favorite within the construction industry.
Key Metrics
7x
Return-On-Ad-Spend
$2.6 million
in Yearly Revenue
67%
Increase in Revenue
Year-over-Year
Why’d They Come to LP?
GME Supply had been running pay-per-click (PPC) ads in-house, but didn’t have the time to effectively manage the campaigns. Paid search wasn’t producing any solid return for GME, but the company’s owner knew that there was potential for it, if only more time could be invested. Eventually, GME decided it was time to try something new with their marketing strategy, and joined Logical Position (LP) in 2015. We discussed the owner’s goals and business strategies during an initial intake call; these have grown over the years we’ve worked together. As of 2021, our team’s return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) goal is a 7x.
What Strategy Was Used?
Our paid search team knew that GME Supply is primarily a B2B business, so we set our target audiences accordingly, with our primary audience being the construction industry. We also knew that GME has thousands of products, which makes it easier to waste budget. To combat this, our team used a granular shopping campaign build style using Single Product Ad Groups (SPAGs) to segment out each of GME’s products individually. We segmented the campaigns by product category, which allowed us to to attain more accurate reporting for GME on their priority products and gain a more in-depth view of how these products are performing.
Our search campaigns use Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) since there are so many different kinds of products on GME’s website—our team knew utilizing a keyword strategy would be too costly. We created multiple DSA campaigns and broke them out by category (similar to how our shopping campaigns are set up). These campaigns dynamically pull in headlines based on how consumers are searching and how their search query matches the relevancy on the GME website. We set the bidding strategy on these campaigns to run target ROAS, which tells Google to optimize toward the ROAS goal we set, then we tweak elements of the campaign from there based on the data.
In addition to shopping and search, we also created display campaigns for GME. We run several YouTube prospecting campaigns that feature a long-form and a short-form video; the clicks on these are incredibly cheap and they serve to bolster GME’s brand awareness. As our campaigns got off the ground, our team made optimizations to stretch the budget farther. Spring and summer are GME’s busy season, with construction sites up and running and more people doing things outside. Knowing GME’s business can be somewhat seasonal, our team is more aggressive with our bids in the warmer seasons, while pulling back during the fall and winter to save money.
What Were the Results
To figure out exactly how much of an impact paid search is having on GME’s business, the company decided to pull the cost of goods sold into their product feed; this lets them compare their profit margins with ROAS. We’re exceeding GME’s current goal of a 7x ROAS; we’re currently seeing a 7.7x—meaning for every $1 GME spends on advertising, they’re earning $7.70 back.
In a year-over-year (YoY) comparison of 2020 versus 2019, our team saw $2.6 million in revenue—a 67% increase—and a 9% increase in ROAS. LP was working with GME both years, which shows that our team is able to increase efficiency and revenue as time goes on. An even better illustration of this can be shown in a comparison of the last 12 months versus the first 12 months we worked with GME—our yearly revenue has doubled from $1.1 million to $2.2 million, with our conversion rate increasing by 23% and total transactions increasing by 116%.
When you’re already the best of the best, you play against yourself—and somehow we still manage to outdo ourselves as the years go by.
