How a young fashion company took sneaker socks and Google Ads to the next level

A good year ago, the fashion company Snocks declared its Google Ads channel “dead”. Today, the company generates more than €1 million in revenue in the account. Here is how we helped Snocks get back on its feet.

We started our work for Snocks in January 2021. It began with an analysis, which showed that the only campaigns that had achieved the desired profitability in the past were those targeting the brand itself.

Generic campaigns, meaning campaigns aligned with search terms without any reference to the brand, had shown no effect and had been paused again.

To assess performance more accurately, we first separated the results for brand traffic (example search: “buy Snocks underwear online”) and generic traffic (example search: “buy underwear online”).

After all, brand traffic generally converts far more profitably, because the people searching have already come into contact with the brand.

Step by step to new customers

But wait: why underwear, when this is about sneaker socks? Quite simply, because this product category in the Snocks range already had a data foundation that we could analyse and learn from. That gave us something to build on.

It quickly became clear that the existing campaigns were set up very broadly. Too broadly. So we narrowed the targeting, partly by switching to “exact match” and “phrase match” keywords and partly by targeting “long-tail keywords”.

Once the campaigns had reached the desired profitability, we were able to widen our reach and become less specific, in other words: add higher-volume keywords to the targeting, and expand into further product categories.

Knocked our socks off

That is how, step by step, we arrived at sneaker socks. It sounds simple, but it was anything but. After all, there was no data foundation yet for the new products that we could build on. And unlike the boxer shorts campaigns, we could not benefit from Google’s Smart Bidding either.

So we targeted specifically and managed bids manually. The first campaigns were built for “running socks”, “tennis socks” and “sneaker socks”. Only once these had got off to a successful start did we move on to generic search terms such as “socks”.

Within a year, we intensified the campaigns so effectively that we have now increased revenue in the Google Ads account to more than €1 million.

A further increase to €2 million is planned for 2022. With the channel once believed dead, SNOCKS has now created a permanent in-house position with a full-time employee for this area.

Would we do it exactly the same way again? Probably not, because the conditions for Google Ads are constantly changing. We respond to the current conditions and develop a concept to match. For your business too.