There are no limits to the exploits you can make with Google ads, especially if you have a very good winning product in your store that you are promoting. Unfortunately, some people believe that running ads only requires a small investment, but this is not the case. You may have to spend more money on ads to generate enough revenue. In this post, we are going to look at how Gary made more than $125 000 per month primarily through Google ads.
Gary Lim is an internet entrepreneur based in Singapore, and he is also a dropshipping expert who has built many stores to the point of 6 figures. He has a YouTube channel where he shares his Various adventures of making money through dropshipping.
Proof of His Income
First and foremost, let us see the proof of the amount of money made, and then we can discuss how the result was achieved.
Above is an image of Gary's Shopify dashboard showing his one-month revenue of $126 852.76 from December 1 to 31 in 2021.
Even after December 2021, he consistently made more than $125 000 per month. In the screenshot above, he earned $815 570.77 between February 1st, 2021, and March 31st, 2022, and this equates to an average monthly revenue of $407 785.37, more than doubling the amount he earned in December 2021.
In this article, we are going to examine in detail how he accomplished this, as well as the amount he spent promoting his dropshipping stores. We are going to calculate his actual monthly income also.
We want to state that despite the gleaming results, the profit made was not as large as the revenue. As a result, this post will be divided into three sections for better comprehension. The first section will be about the product, the second about the strategy used to accomplish this feat, and the third about costs and figures.
Section One: The Product
Gary chose to sell smartwatches as his product. When he first launched the product, he used a strategy of starting with one smartwatch that did well at the time. He usually spent around $1 000 daily on advertisements, and his daily sales were around $2 000. So he decided to add more smartwatches to his collection in his store, and presently, there are now over 15 smartwatches on the website. However, a specific variant of smartwatches accounted for 80% of sales. Gary also sells both portable and smart blood pressure monitors in his online store.
Looking at the store, you may be prompted to ask about the metrics behind the massive success in sales. The number one reason this product might be doing well is because of its decent and simple landing page. Gary used Pagefly integrated with Shopify to build his store's pages which look professionally made. What he did was simply to replicate the structural page design of his competitors. Copying the page layout of a winning product is one of the ways to make a quick success in the dropshipping industry.
You should be aware that, aside from the design layout, you are not expected to copy anything else, including product descriptions, but you may model after them. You must create a value proposition that is unique to your product. The reason for modeling after competitors is that they have most likely spent a significant amount of money testing various things on their websites and have discovered the one with the highest conversion rate.
Another reason the product is doing well is that it is reasonably priced. The average price of a smartwatch is $80, which is very low.
This works well because it is a low-cost alternative to Apple and Samsung smartwatches, which cost between $300 and $500.
Gary has made it so that you can get the same value and features for $80 instead of $300. The watches include a blockchain tracker, blood pressure monitor, heart monitor, and a very long battery life on which the product can operate. This means that the average person can get all of these features for less than $300.
Gary put it like this:
"For this product, we had a very high perceived value and when people go and buy in an Apple store, it will cost them anywhere from like $400 to like $500, but for this product, we are selling it for like 80 bucks."
Gary had initially sold this product only in the top four countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. He then tried selling in other countries with a different store language, and the product continued to sell well. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the product is already performing well in the top countries.
Surprisingly, for products like smartwatches, people tend to buy more than one, especially because they are so inexpensive. They intend to purchase them for their wives, children, and even relatives. When conducting product research, it is paramount to choose a product that people can easily buy more than once.
Finally, the fact that this product has a high search volume contributes to its success. If you look up Google Keyword Planner or any other tool that helps you find keyword density, you will notice that the keyword "smartwatches" is very popular. It is no surprise that major corporations are attempting to dominate this space.
A point to note is that if you are selling a variety of products, you will have a product or group of products that outperform the others. In this case, you have to adopt the paradox principle or the 80/20 rule to make a decision on what to do. 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your products. What you should do at this point is capitalize on and optimize the products that are doing well so you can increase your revenue. Simple things like adding more colour to the products to add variation can make your store look more appealing.
Nonetheless, there are numerous disadvantages to selling smartwatches. Customers file complaints about various parts not working properly or even dead products because they are electronic products. This usually results in a refund request from the customer, and Shopify policy does not like frequent returns as this will definitely affect your store's rating on Shopify. You will get many warnings from Shopify if there are many returns that will jeopardize the integrity of your store.
Section Two: The Strategy used For Promotion
For the traffic source, there are two sources that Gary used for the site. The first major one is Google ads, and the second is Bing ads.
According to Gary,
"Google ads are responsible for 85% of the traffic source while Bing ads carry the remaining 15%. If you are someone that is running google ads profitably, I highly recommend that you should set up Bing ads as well because you can increase your profitability especially as the product is already working on Google. There is a very high chance that it is going to work on Bing as well because it is literally like the same kind of advertising channel where people are searching for the product based on the keywords and then they are clicking on the shopping ads. Although it is on a different platform, the kind of results you are going to see is very similar".
The reason Gary uses Google ads is that it is more consistent in getting traffic and traction, compared to Tiktok ads or other social media ads. Social media ads are mostly based on trends and you can only run them profitably for about a month or two after which the trend will lose traction.
Also, if you look at the majority of the dropshipping stores on the Google page, you will notice that they have been around for about 2 or 3 years and have been making $15 000 to $30 000 per month in sales. This is far superior to doing Tiktok ads for two months and then having nowhere to turn afterward.
We want to state that running Google ads campaigns can be difficult, but the hard work is in the early stages of testing the product. Once the product has been proven to be profitable, managing the advertising campaign becomes relatively simple. At that point, the only thing left to do is to optimize the ads from time to time and conduct analysis.
In short, Google is one of the best platforms to start with; it just takes consistency and patience over time.
How To Hack Google ads to Get More Traffic
Gary used a unique strategy to increase his sales even further by hacking already successful Google ads, but this is more effective during scaling up campaigns, He replicated an ad group that was performing well, then started a new campaign group and let it run.
What you will notice about Google is that there often appears to be a cap on how much you can spend for each product you are selling due to competitors bidding for the same keyword. Too many people bidding for the same or similar keywords increases the keyword demand in the marketplace that you are selling to; therefore, to artificially increase the number of impressions, they limit the amount of time the ads can run without your knowledge.
As previously stated, you can go into your campaign dashboard and look at some of the keywords that are already bringing in a lot of sales.
Create completely separate product listings for all of the keywords that had a lot of conversions with high returns. So you are telling people you are launching a new product, but it is actually the same product with different keywords. With this strategy, you will be able to capture a significant portion of Google traffic impressions via two channels of traffic in separate campaigns.
Section Three: Income and Revenue
December:
- Initial Revenue — $130 917
- Money refunded — $4 064
- Revenue after deducting refunds — $126 852.76
- Google ads expenses — $SG 58 588.32.
- Bing ads expenses — $SG 16 684.88
- Total ad spends — $SG 75 273.2.
Note that the ad costs are all in Singapore Dollar. Converting to USD:
- Total ad spends — $53,001.64.
- Total income — $73 851.12.
This is just a rough estimate of the expenses since there will be some other fees such as the merchant services which he didn't give the details about.
Conclusion
We have seen that smartwatches are good products to sell in your store because they are inexpensive and provide the same value as higher-priced brands. In addition, we have discovered that running Google AdWords campaigns is the best option for a long-term dropshipping business, as opposed to social media platforms that thrive on trends. As a result, it is preferable to stick with Google Ads in order to maintain consistent sales.
Hacking Google ads by replicating a successful ad group helps to divert more traffic to one's store, and running Bing ads is not a bad idea if a campaign is already performing well on Google ads. It is important not to forget that using Google ads can be stressful initially, but it can be profitable if one is consistent and patient over a long time.
