The Client

ENU Nutrition created a proprietary line of nutrition shakes and dietary supplements. They prefer clients in the medical nutrition support vertical, but their products work for athletic use and general weight management as well. The company is now a subsidiary of Ajinomoto.

The Need

ENU entered an extremely competitive market with a completely new product, and they needed to build awareness and generate sales. Their product had a competitive edge, but we had to figure out how to steal market share from the likes of Ensure, Boost, and other large nutrition shake brands. In sum, ENU Nutrition needed brand awareness and revenue — on a very limited budget.

The Work

Since ENU was getting decent visibility through organic content strategy (delivered by Majux Marketing), I proposed Google Shopping as the best paid media channel — Google Shopping users are more inclined to buy, and our product would show alongside the heavy-hitters in the niche.

The challenge was that ENU only had three products, and they are relevant to a number of search queries: nutritional shakes, weight gain shakes, protein shakes, weight gain powder, nutrition powder, and more. It was impossible to get enough volume with only three Google shopping feed items.

So I developed a proprietary strategy (that I wrote about on PPC Hero’s blog): I created four different shopping feeds in Google Merchant Center with the same products, and I wrote different titles and descriptions for each feed. I then connected all four of those feeds to the same Google Ads account, and siloed the search queries with negative keyword lists.

This effectively quadrupled the terms our shopping ads were eligible to show for, and our revenue grew significantly as a result.

I also monitored search terms, edited bids, and performed regular daily account optimization.

The Results

Month-over-month revenue from Google Ads increased by 150%, and May’s return on ad spend (ROAS) — 160.33% — was the highest ENU Nutrition had seen from a paid media channel.

Here are two contrasting screenshots from Google Analytics:

May 1-27 2020 (after new strategy)

April 1-27 2020 (before new strategy implementation):

We also saw a corresponding 7% increase to “direct” revenue, which is Google Analytics’ way of saying “I have no idea where this revenue came from.” Since no other account changes had been made, that revenue lift likely came from the Google Shopping campaign as well.