Profit bidding and campaign automation, step by step. This is the GROW MethodologyTM on one page.
- Track your costsStart with your purchase price, payment fees and returns rate. Add shipping subsidy, handling, customer service and other fees over time. Some cost tracking is better than none.
- Calculate your true marginsTake every cost off the selling price without VAT, allow for returns, and add lifetime value where you have it.
- Know your breakeven ROASSelling price divided by your profit per sale after returns. Below it, every sale loses money.
- Set your profit targetBreak even to 2% when you are starting or scaling, 3% to 5% for market share, and a lower target on high value products.
- Calculate a ROAS bid for every productSelling price divided by your profit per sale after returns, minus your profit target.
- Give every product its own bidA Shopping campaign with a single product ad group per product, segmented by price group, brand or category.
- Add Performance Max by margin groupRound each ROAS bid to the nearest 0.5 and run one campaign per group.
- Adjust for tracking accuracyAllow for the sales your tracking misses, so profitable products aren’t bid down.
- Keep it up to dateRecalculate bids when costs or prices change, and push the changes to Google Ads.
- Change bids gradually5% to 10% relative changes at a time, with a week between steps.
Every step in this guide you can implement yourself. In the next section, we show you how GROW automates all of it.