Game top-up and digital goods store
61:1
Best month: SAR 107,160 on SAR 3,040 · SAR 1.94 cost per sale
Digital goods with thin margins and small order values. Loose clicks eat the profit, so different product categories cannot live inside one blended campaign.
I split the campaigns by product type. That exposed one segment bleeding at 2.8 and another returning an exceptional number that had to be checked before anyone built on it.
What was happening
A digital product with a thin margin and a small ticket size. Any waste in targeting eats the margin whole, and the account cannot carry one combined campaign that mixes categories together.
What did not add up
I tried the combined campaign first and it gave me a comfortable average. When I split it apart, one campaign inside was losing and another was returning several times over, and the average had been hiding both.
What I changed
- I split campaigns by product category instead of running one combined campaign.
- I ran Shopping and Search on separate objectives, because each is judged on a different measure.
- I tracked cost per sale daily, the only indicator that means anything at this margin.
What happened next
- Best month
- SAR 107,160 on SAR 3,040
- ROAS, best month
- 61:1
- Cost per sale
- SAR 1.94
- Largest month by volume
- SAR 216,053 on SAR 4,981
- ROAS, largest month
- 43:1
The evidence
What this means for a similar account
If your store sells many categories, the blended account average may be comforting while one part of the budget is leaking. Good management makes each category readable on its own.
The highest returning campaign in this account is the one that got banned. It hit 95:1 and was then stopped because it was bidding on a registered trademark. What I took from it is that a number far outside everything around it needs checking before you build on it, because the cause may be a violation rather than skill.
Recognise your account here?