The Six Steps to Scaling a Dropshipping Store on Google Ads

All right, listen. If you are not even hitting 1K in revenue a day yet, then trust me, it's not your campaign setup, it's not your bid strategy, it's not your media buyer, it's not PMax versus standard shopping, it's not your creative, it's not how fancy looking your website is, and it's not whatever you think in general it is. I'm Chris. I'm the CEO and founder of Cenox Media, and we manage over 200 e-commerce brands and work with some of the biggest Google Ads drop shippers in the game. And there

are exactly six things you need to focus on. Just six things only. They go in an exact order, right? So, you need to follow along step by step, because if you miss one, or if you focus on one of the later steps first, but you don't have the most important one as a foundation already in place, you will fail, right? And then you're stuck. And you're stuck because most of you guys do number four and five first, but you don't even have one, two, three in order yet, right? So, follow along. I will show you everything in this video, and let's dive straight into it.

Let's go. So, the first and most important principle I want to introduce to you,

because a lot of people still don't get it. You have to understand Google Ads drop shipping is a complete numbers game. It's all about numbers, numbers, testing, testing, test, test, test, test, test, right? And not just new product and developing new winners. That's the obvious one, but it's not just about, "Hey, testing five to 10 products a day." No, obviously you have to do that. You constantly have to test products, but even that with a proper system, right? A lot of people do it randomly. And you're watching that right now, and you will probably catch yourself, "Hey, I'm not having a proper system behind it.

A lot of it is just random, right?" But then also like new

markets, new store, new niches. You constantly have to stay on the ball, and you might think now, "Okay, I'm doing that." But like in reality, a lot of people are not doing that. For example, what a lot of beginners are doing, they typically launch one store in one market with a set of product, and then they do test a little bit, you know, a couple of products here and there, but overall it's very steady, right? They basically hand it off to a media buyer, or they run it themselves. They set a certain budget, they set up a campaign, maybe with one of the videos they have watched from me before, right?

Simple setup video, and then they just like wait. There is like no proper game plan, right? Like they don't have a system on, "Okay, how long do we wait and gather some data, right? Like what are the next steps at which points, right? Like what kind of metrics, metric mark, metric goal I want to hit? What do I need to see in terms of CPC, AOV, conversion rate, right? Also, everything about numbers here, right? because if you know, "Okay, I hit that benchmark in this and this and this regards, then a profitable ROAS is just the all these thing that will happen down the line.

Everything is downstream from there. So, you constantly want to test, you constantly want to tweak, but in a data-driven way, not randomly, right? You want to look at your data and understand, "Okay, what's working, what's working well, and why? How can I double down on that? What's not working, and why, right? How can I resolve that? Very simple. Like of course there are a lot of variables, and that is overwhelming sometimes, but you need to break it down simply first, right? And focus on the most important things first, which I will show you in the next step. The second and most important

lesson for you to understand is that it's all about the offer. It's all about the offer, and a lot of people, especially beginners, don't understand that. They always want to over-optimize every single little detail, right? They are barely at $100 spent a day, but they want to do and implement crazy AB tests. They over-optimize the titles like crazy, like literally everything, but they don't even have the main thing properly in place yet, right? Which is your offer. It's all about your offer, all about finding winning products that are in demand, that are in season, ideally don't have a lot of competition,

and for Google also super important. I emphasized it a lot in multiple videos. Google is a price comparison platform, right? So, with your offer, you also have to make sure that you're competitive in terms of pricing to a certain degree. Right? A lot of people overlooked that as well. They don't have great margin on their products, so they're just not really competitive, so they just set pricing way higher than everybody else. But obviously, on Google, on Google Shopping, that limits you quite a bit, right? And then they are surprised like, "Why can we not scale properly?" So, either they don't get good volume and at scale, right?

Or they don't get good results, good ROAS in the first place, even at small budgets. So, the main principle, the

main takeaway here is you cannot optimize your way out of a shitty offer, right? If that is cooked like you have no chance in terms of like, "Oh, we will do this with the media buying. We will do this with the website A/B optimization." All that follows next, right? The offer first, and then everything else. That's why, and I will repeat it again, that's what I said in the beginning of the video, the order of the lessons we discuss here is important as well, right? So, lesson one was it's a numbers game. Lesson two was all about the offer. It's all about the offer. And now we talk about lesson three.

Let's go. All right, lesson

number three is you need to understand your overall store makeup, feed makeup. You need to understand where the money goes. Why is that? So, a lot of people, they always sit here and they are like, "Ah, Chris, I want to scale, but I don't really know how or I don't really can because my ROAS is not good enough right now, right? So, I cannot scale." That's it, end of story. No further analysis, no reason how, why, or no identification of the bottleneck, right? But I see those people like doing 5, 10, 15, 20k days, whatever. So, it's always the same, right? It's like you don't even know where to start.

And that's why we outlined in the previous lesson, What's the most important thing? The offer. So, always start there. That's why we said, "Hey, you need to understand your overall store breakdown makeup and what's happening within that feed, right?" So, the most basic thing

we will do, we categorize your current feed, your different offers, right? Into four different categories. We have these labels. We use them within the agency. That's how we categorize products on on the root level, right? That's the most basic thing. We do have champions. So, these are like your absolute winners. They have a lot of volume, but also great ROAS. So, great ROAS, lot of volume, your absolute winners. Then we have potentials. These are products with great ROAS, but they don't have a lot of volume yet, right? So, they're not properly tested, not properly proven. We have sleepers. They are basically nothing's going on there, right?

Like not a lot of sales, not a lot of clicks, or mostly like zero sales and not a lot of clicks, not a lot of data yet, right? Not a lot of spend goes to those products. And then you have your wasters. These are products that are generally not profitable and you want to get rid of them or at least control them ASAP, right? As quickly as possible. And you want to be quite aggressive with that. And now we already one step further, right? Because now we see, "Okay, we have this amount of winners, this amount of potential products, we have this amount of sleepers or whatever, and we have this amount of wasters, right?" And then you can start

to break it down. Okay, if I have more wasters than actual winners, then of course I'm somehow limited in scaling, even if I have a lot of winners, right? If I have a lot of winners, but I also have a lot of wasters, then obviously I cannot continue to scale further, right? Because it kind of unfortunately balances itself out in a negative way. You have a lot of products bringing in a lot of money, great ROAS, great profit margin, but at the same time there are other products that kind of waste that, right? So, like you cannot continue to push further. So, it's important like to do two main things, cut and control the wasters and continue to scale and push the winners, right?

That's the most basic thing in terms of budget management. But then also other things because you want to scale, right? You want to continue to scale, you want to get way more volume. You want to go to 5 10 15k days. So, it's not just about okay, we'll put more budget on the winners. That's like the drop ship world level one, right? You

also want to go a little bit deeper into some basic data analytics or pattern recognition be like, "Okay, what actually drives those wasters, right? Is there any reason behind it? Is there any category where we see that pops up more often there? Same with the winners, right? Like try to break it down. Okay, why is that product doing that well, right? Do we have other similar products doing that well? Can we maybe double down on that category? Couple things like that. Instead of just sitting here and be like, "Ah, I want to scale." You want to start with the feed breakdown, right? Like we said before, the offer is your main thing.

So, start there, right? Start to identifying what happens there with your offers. What works, what doesn't work, and why? And then you will go much much further already. And you

have somewhere to start, right? You have something to analyze. You have something to optimize. Also, when I sit here and I analyze, right? Even if it's going great. Even if I still can't continue to scale, but if I sit here and see, "All right, we have uh 10 wasters, for example, and we have two winners, but we're still crushing it." And then I'm looking at, "Okay, we have two winners, and they're absolutely going nuts, right?" But it's still a situation where I'm like super careful. I know that's very risky for my business if I know, "Hey, okay. We're actually doing well. We're actually scaling, but everything depends on those two products, right?

That's a situation you don't want to be in, right? Or also, if you have those winners, or even if it's more winners, but you see, "Okay, they're all within just one product category." And you know this product category is out of season soon. Or just one competitor comes in, slightly

underprices you, and it cuts your demand in in half, right? So, you basically like want to do a little SWOT analysis on that as well, right? You break it down, you have your feet. You basically want to like take this huge thing that you have here, which is your store, which is your feet, and want to start to break it down, right? Step by step. Categorize it first. Do your data analytics work, some basic pattern recognition, right? Like, "Hey, what's going on? What can we do about it? What's the risk? What's our strength? What's What's our current weakness? Why do we have this weakness? Why do we have this winners?" You want to start to dig

deeper, right? And then you can actually properly start to scale. So, predictable is the keyword, right? Because that's that's something I need to do understand. A lot of people out there, whatever revenue numbers they are doing, right? Like, you don't even understand, they have no clue what they're doing. They're scaling purely based on luck, right? Like, copying some random products that are doing quite well on some other stores. It's It's doing well for them, but they have no proper system right? It's pure luck. There is no system. They cannot predictably repeat that success because they don't do what we discussed here in lesson three, right?

They are not able to break it down. They are not seeing the patterns themselves. I had clients before doing 20K days, and they didn't understand what's going on. They didn't understand what brought them there in the first place, and when revenue dipped, they didn't didn't understand a single thing of why it dipped, right? It's purely like base like, "Oh, scale, right?" The drop shipper drop shipper level one, but no clue about what why when how. So, lesson number four, and only now we

start to optimize the finer details. Now we start to optimize our numbers, our metrics, our AOV, conversion rate. We look at our CPC more in detail. We look at basic SEO, right? Making sure we have all the product details, page speed, email marketing flows, post purchase flows, getting everything out of every single click, right? And it's important to understand that's the main takeaway here. Like you don't do that right at the beginning. It doesn't make any sense. You try to over optimize things when you're still spending 50, 100 a day, right? You don't have the foundation locked in yet. So, you need to do that first.

You need to understand it's a numbers game. You need to understand that you have to focus on the offer. And then you need to break down the offer. You need to break down the feed, right? You need to understand what's going on, what's working, what's not working. And only then we start to do those things, right? Working on your profit margin, working on the AOV, seeing what can be done about it. The reason is why are we only doing that now? Two reasons. First of all, if

you're still at 50, 100 spent a day, right? And you cannot scale, you don't have the foundation locked in yet. That will not make any difference, right? Like doing this optimizations when the foundation is not there yet will will not bring your scale. It will not do much. It's It's simply pointless at this stage, right? It doesn't It doesn't do much. Don't get me wrong. It's like super important now, right? It's super important at the stage we are right now. It's the right timing. We have the foundation locked in. Everything is great. Now we can scale. Now we can get the most out of every click because now we spend some proper money on it as well, right?

But if you're still struggle with the foundation, it's simply pointless. It It's not doing anything. That's reason number one. And reason number two is even if it would make a huge difference in the beginning. Right? Don't get me wrong. Like if you have a optimized AOV, like of course that would be beneficial right out the gate, right? But you cannot even optimize some of these numbers because you don't have a lot of data yet, right? You don't even know what's working, what's not working yet. Like we said, you're still at 50, 100 spent a day, right? Like that's that's barely anything. So, like you cannot even properly optimize that, right?

If I spend 500,

600, 1K, 2K a day, whatever it is, right? Once I have that, like I can buy more data in one day than you cannot even do that same stuff in like one to weeks, right? So, with that I can also like optimize way way quicker. I get more data way way quicker. I get feedback way quicker, right? And based on that, I can make some moves. And now it's valuable. Now I can optimize my numbers and now I have some proper spend behind it. Like I said, I spend 1 to 2K a day right now. So, I want to get the most out of every click, right?

If I already have to pay for it now and I pay quite a lot, I spend quite a lot, now is the time. Now I want to optimize and now

I want to get every single thing out of every click, right? All right, lesson number five, step number five. Now we get to the exciting stuff because finally we understand it's a numbers game. We understand we have to focus on the offer. We understand how and how we can actually control it by understanding what's going on within our store, within our feed. We have optimized our numbers and finally we have some momentum. We are scaling and we are making moves. And now we are focusing on the media buying, on a proper structure. No more gambling, no more one PMax, all products in there, I don't know what I'm doing.

If the ROAS is good, I will scale. If not, I will scale back. Now we actually also have a structure in place. Supports you in scaling and keeping up the momentum so you can continue to scale without hitting a plateau or without yeah, dropping back to your old numbers

down the line, right? So, you want to build a structure around the scale, right? You want to ensure it keeps going and you keep crushing it now. Why do we do that? Because if you don't, you're basically just a victim of whatever Google is doing with your account, right? Whatever happens within your one PMax. If it scales the winners, great. If it doesn't, what are you going to do about it, right? If it suddenly pushes more spend to wasters, what are you going to do about it if you don't have any split, any labels, nothing in the account, right? Or even if it's going well, like we said before, you have a couple of winners, but you're super reliant on one, two, three products, right?

And nothing new is coming up. And you're scaling and scaling, and suddenly you hit the plateau. Or you even drop again after some time, right? Because those winners are not performing to the same level anymore. But you never make sure you actually develop new winners as well, right? So,

you can keep scaling, keep scaling, and have a proper foundation that's not just built on luck. So, that's why we're doing it. How we're doing it, we would just break it down very quick and simple here because we have a full-blown 20-30 minute video on that, a couple of videos on that where we actually talk about the different structures, right? Where we say, "Hey, we have a high-performer campaign that pushes your your products. We have a high-performer campaign that pushes pretty much all of your feed, right? Just excluding the wasters, then we have a small campaign that basically isolates your wasters if you don't want to like exclude them completely yet, right?

Usually we just isolate them first. Depending on the size and the stage of your account, it's not like black and white. There are a lot of variables to to consider sometimes. Depending on the size and stage of your account, you might want to have a booster campaign to keep pushing your winners further if you have a lot of them or just the potentials, right? So, the potentials are products again that have great ROAS, some sales, but not a lot of data yet. You might want to have a booster, like we just outlined before, that just focuses on new products, on your sleepers, developing new winners, right?

So, you keep going, keep scaling, developing new winners. So, it's not black and white. Depends a little bit on your stage. Just giving you some ideas here if you want to learn more about how to scale properly, feel free to check some of the other videos where we talk about the structure, or also join our school. Link is below, somewhere here, somewhere there, wherever you will find it. And there we talk like way more extensively with way more video materials well on like how to set up your account, how to structure your account, and when to do what, right? Within the school, you also find a lot of SOPs that we're using within our agency.

It's basically free to join, so yeah, it's a no-brainer if you're in Google Ads. I will see you there then. So, now we get to lesson

number six, and before we dive into that, just a quick recap. I hope you understand now why we always emphasize here in this video the order matters, right? You need to master lesson one first, then lesson two, then lesson three, then lesson four and five, right? If you don't do that, try to skip that, it will not work, right? For example, if you go straight to the media buying without having a proper foundation in place, it cannot work, right? The media buying cannot fix a shitty foundation. Then you see people, you know, like going around and they they're working with the fifth agency and like, "Oh, this agency is This agency is This agency is shit." Of course this agency is if you don't have a proper foundation in place, right?

Like nobody can fix that. So, that's super important. That's why you need to follow these steps step by step, focusing on the right thing at the right time, and then you will be able to succeed. And then lesson number six, one of the most important ones as well to understand, is that this is a constant flywheel, right? So, we have lesson one, two, three, four, five. Now we are point six, and now it starts again, right? It's a constant optimization flywheel. It's never static. There are so many variables, so many different products, different seasonalities, different sales cycles, and so on, right? So, it constantly continues, continues, and continues.

It's never static. For

example, once you reach 10K day, it's not like, "Ah, you made it. Now you will make 10K days forever, right?" You want to make sure you stay there. You want to make sure you can potentially scale even further. So, it's not like, "Oh, you unlocked that level and you will stay there forever." right? You can drop back to 2K day in no time. Very much possible. Happened multiple times. Happened to client of mine as well, right? Because that's how it works. Something brought you there in the first place, something can bring you back to the old status quo as well, if we are not continuing to optimize every single aspect of this of this flywheel, right?

So, that's that's why this is one of the most important ones. It constantly continues. You constantly need to find the bottlenecks, what holds you back, and then you can continue to scale further in Google Ads drop shipping. So, I hope that video

helps. It definitely does because it works, right? Like we said, we manage over 20 e-com brands. We work with some of the biggest drop shippers in the game. So, every single thing here in this video is actually gold, right? If you fully understand it and you know how to implement it, you will be able to scale further. All right, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the video. If so, like, subscribe, whatever you have to do on social media, and see you in the next one. >> [music]