Best Practices
09.06.2022
TLDR
FactoryPure, an e-commerce company founded by the Ravitsky brothers, has achieved substantial growth by implementing a Google Ads strategy tailored to their budget. They allocate more ad spend to bestsellers, invest in long-tail keywords for high-intent users, and coordinate paid keywords with product launches to boost organic traffic. This strategy, focused on directing users to hero products with minimal clicks, can benefit businesses of any size, provided they target high-value customers with precise keyword choices.
Over the last few showcase articles, we have focused on community-building, organic traffic, and strategic product launches. So this week, we deep dive into a 9-year-old company’s Google Ads strategy instead. We will talk about how FactoryPure leverages a small marketing budget to target high-intent users through their targeted search campaign strategy.
When brothers Michael and Eugene Ravitsky immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union, they caught the entrepreneurship bug. As children, they began (unsuccessfully) selling balloons door-to-door in their apartment complex. Today, their Shopify store brings in eight figures in annual revenue.
FactoryPure entered the e-commerce space in 2013 exclusively selling air-purifiers. They have been steadily expanding their product line ever since. Today they sell anything from wood stoves to electric skateboards. From 2017 to 2021, the Ravitsky brothers estimate that their revenue has grown by 100% year-over-year.
FactoryPure was able to sustain this growth by using a Google Ads and keyword strategy that is effective regardless of the size of your marketing budget. Their long-tail keywords and ad campaigns are designed to A) engage users who are ready to buy, and B) direct them to bestselling products in as few steps as possible. This ad strategy is central to the setup of their site and business - 74% of all of FactoryPure’s search traffic over the last three months has come from paid search.
Initially, their bare-bones website struggled to compete against household names in the home appliances space. The Ravitsky brothers were eventually able to stand out by investing in their online presence, namely through advertising and keywords. Similarweb estimates that FactoryPure spent $144.6k on PPC search terms from February to April of 2022.
Over time, their investments have paid off. FactoryPure ended 2016 with over half a million dollars in profit - two years later this number was more than $6 million. As of 2021, their monthly revenue averages around $3 million.
Businesses don’t need to spend hundreds of thousands on Google Ads to appropriate this strategy. Below are three of FactoryPure’s most effective tactics when it comes to ad spending that can be implemented by any business at any stage of growth.
Allocate more of your ad spend budget to your bestsellers
Initially selling only air purifiers, the Ravitsky brothers have since expanded their product range immensely. Once introduced, generators quickly became their bestselling product, consistently accounting for around half of their annual revenue. Seeing a growth opportunity, the company decided to double down on ad spend for their best selling products’ landing pages.
FactoryPure’s homepage ranks third in terms of traffic share when it comes to paid landing pages - it is the only page in their top ten that doesn’t link directly to a product. Four of the five top landing pages lead to different types of generators. Their most popular landing page leads to their DuroMax Electric Generator and accounts for an impressive 7.47% of traffic. They spent an estimated $5.1k on this search campaign (over seven times more than they spent on their homepage) and used 85 keywords. For their homepage, they used only one.
In return for these investments, product pages for their bestsellers receive more than double the traffic share than the homepage.
This strategy leads users directly to bestseller products pages that are likely to have higher conversion rates. FactoryPure’s ad investment indicates that they are keenly aware of their hero products and willing to leverage them wherever possible.
Invest in long-tail keywords tailored to users that are ready to buy
When it comes to keyword strategy, founder Eugene Ravitsky says it’s about knowing your audience and targeting them with precision. FactoryPure does this by using long, specific keywords to target customers are near the end of the buyer’s journey.
For Ravitsky, this means targeting the plumbers and electricians that install their goods, “We're targeting those key terms when we can as opposed to individual consumers.” These users likely already know what they need to buy by the time they are searching for it. Within seven months of using these longer-tailed keywords, FactoryPure increased their ROAS by 40% and revenue by 189.54%.
FactoryPure now spends most of their ad budget on longer keyword phrases that include language specific to the products they carry. In the below ad, they keyword FactoryPure purchased was “dimensions of a Genarac 24kw generator.” This phrase is highly specific, and would likely only be used by someone who was already seriously considering purchasing the product.
“We try to target longer-tailed keywords, where people are a little bit further into the process and they know what they want…Let's say you have $50 a day to spend on ads, you'd want those $50 to go to those longer-tailed keywords than somebody searching just for water heaters.” - Founder Eugene Ravitsky.
FactoryPure references fuel types, special sizes, model numbers or specific brands in many of their paid keywords. This is information that only highly-motivated customers would know to use. The above three ads all include these kinds of qualifiers, and all rank within the top three in terms of ad position for those keywords. Not only are these ads guaranteed to reach their intended audience, but the odds are high that these users are in the final stages of the buyers journey when they come across them.
To supplement this strategy and boost conversion rates, FactoryPure uses negative keywords to their advantage as well. This feature in Google Ads allows you to prevent your ad from showing up when users include a certain keyword in their search. For example, Eugene says he uses the tool to exclude users that are “looking for a product manual, [or] troubleshooting or whatnot. You don't want to pay for them to click on your ad because you know they're not shopping for a product.”
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Coordinate paid keywords with product launches to increase organic traffic
While paid search is what drives FactoryPure’s traffic, the Ravitsky brothers are also aware of how to use their ad strategy to garner organic traffic, particularly regarding their new product lines. According to Eugene, FactoryPure goes “heavier on ads, especially as [they] add new product categories.” Take the launch of their new line of grow tents, for example.
To complement this launch, FactoryPure introduced the paid keyword “grow room.” Shown below, this phrase increased in traffic by 232.19% from March to April of 2022. The keyword garners 100% paid traffic for FactoryPure and uses language that directly references their new product line.
More recently (over the last 28 days), the phrase “which grow tent is the best for growing cannabis” has become their fourth most effective keyword. The traffic funneled in from this phrase is 100% organic (see below). By coordinating their paid search strategy to complement their new product launch, FactoryPure has been rewarded with 100% organic traffic from this new keyword phrase.
In the world of e-commerce, paid search strategy can determine whether you sink or swim. FactoryPure’s central goal when it comes to using Google Ads has been to direct the right users to hero products in as few clicks as possible. This strategy can be useful at any stage of growth - so long as your keywords are informed by knowledge of high value customers, and your bestselling product pages are leveraged wherever possible.
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