Launching B2B Ads: A Merchant Case Study

Great Lakes Dental Technologies is a B2B distributor of dental supplies on Magento. Two years ago the firm decided to start running ads on Google. In this case study session we’ll explore how Great Lakes got started in advertising, the choices made, and how it has turned out, so far. We’ll talk about the business and marketing decisions as well as technical choices made along the way.

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TRANSCRIPT

MC: All right, let’s see. We got some rowdies in the house over for the business track this time. So ready to get this one rolling? All right. This one’s really exciting. We have an awesome merchant case study, so it’s always great to hear straight from the horse’s mouth. Right. We’ve got Adam and I practiced on this one. Randazzo, based out of western New York, works for a B2B merchant called Great Lakes Dental Technology.

He’s been involved with Magento since 2010 and has worked at Great Lakes since 2011. He has partnered and is sharing an awesome story with two individuals that I had the joy of meeting, at Meet Magento that was online during like, you know, the before fore-times. We’re in a breakout room. I’m noticing that they had the same last names, but they’re in completely different spaces.

And I was like, oh, that’s really interesting. You guys like to joke this breakout room had different names. I’m sorry. Same last name. They’re like, yeah, well, we’re married and everyone in the room kind of like, realize that that epiphany of, the beauty of being able to work with your spouse or maybe not being able to work with your spouse.

And these individuals are Megan Deppner, the COO of Psyberware. As an agency that clients navigate the complexities of the advertising systems and really to test new functionality to help Magento merchants. She is partnered with. I guess she’ll be the better half of David “Psy” Deppner, who is the CEO. And together they are going to share with us launching B2B ads, a merchant case study.

So give it up for Adam, Megan and David.

David/Psy: Good afternoon. Yeah. Yeah. It’s nice to see everybody at Meet Magento in New York again. It’s been, a great year. Missed some of you haven’t seen in a year. So I’m David Deppner, CEO of Psyberware. And, we’re going to do an interesting little case study today.

We’re going to do a little case study today talking about one of our clients, Great Lakes Dental Technologies, and how we launched B2B ads for them over this last year. We’re going to talk a little bit about some of the challenges that Great Lakes faced initially. We’ll talk about our collaboration between Psyberware and Great Lakes Dental. Some of the decisions that we made about how how to structure their ad account, how to make certain decisions initially, choices and the results that came out of that.

And we’ll follow up with just a little bit about, next steps and where we’re going to go from here. So, Adam, why don’t you tell us a little bit about Great Lakes?

Adam: Thank you. So I’m Adam Randazzo. I’ve been a e-commerce professional for the last 18 years. I’ve been working with Magento for 15 of those years, and I’ve been with Great Lakes for almost 13 years.

So let’s talk a little bit about Great Lakes. So Great Lakes is primarily a B2B company in the dental industry. So we mostly serve dentists and dental laboratories. As far as dentists go, we focus a lot on general dentists, orthodontists, oral surgeons, periodontist. Our company is very weird. To be blunt. We have two very distinct divisions, that I’ll talk more about in a couple minutes.

We have our lab division and our products division, company was founded in 1965 as Great Lakes Orthodontics. And then in 2018, we actually rebranded to Great Lakes Dental Technologies to sort of reflect changes in the business. So we’re going to touch on that a little bit later. One interesting thing about us is that we are fully employee owned.

So everybody that works there, is an employee owner. And right now there are 215 of us. So I’m going to start and talk a little bit about our laboratory division. So our lab division manufactures oral appliances. So what’s an oral appliance. So if you ever had a retainer, clear aligners similar to Invisalign, devices for sleep apnea, people that have, TMJ disorder and facial pain.

So we manufacture bespoke devices for those, those are not sent to us through Magento. Those are usually sent through, they’re uploaded as 3D files to us with a doctor’s prescription. So that’s not through Magento, but we do utilize Magento as a product display for our laboratory. So our products division is really more your standard, B2B type merchant.

You know, again, we sell supplies to mostly dentists in dental laboratories. What’s interesting is that we sell to a lot of our competitors. So we have a really great name in the industry. People trust us. So there’s a lot of smaller local and regional labs across the country that look to us and buy products from that division.

Our product mix is very disparate, so we sell everything from brackets that get bonded onto a patient’s teeth, the rubber bands that go on them, a lot of thermoforming plastics all the way up through really high end equipment like 3D scanners and 3D printers. We have about 3000 different products. And, if you think of it in Magento terms with like, product families or attribute groups, we’re at like over 150 attribute groups in Magento.

E-commerce right now is about 25% of our sales for that division. The other 75% really comes from your traditional B2B channels. Inbound call center. We get some email orders. We do a lot of trade shows and we do a lot of education. So we work with some of the top clinicians across the United States.

And actually globally. And we have a presence usually at their educational events. So quick word about our tech stack. We are an Adobe Commerce user. Specifically, we utilize the B2B package. If it wasn’t for the B2B package, I don’t think we’d be running our business nearly as well. For our inbound marketing and email marketing, we use Klaviyo, and that’ll be important.

Later on, when David talks, ERP, we’re integrated with Dynamics 365, and we use Akeneo, you know, for our Pin.

So let’s talk about a few business issues that we have. First is that, the dental industry as a whole, since Covid is down, you know, they say flat, but really what’s happening is that dentists across the US are seeing about 5% fewer patients walk through their door. So you know, that that makes it a little bit tougher for us, too, because they’re not buying as many supplies.

So we’re dealing with that. Ever since Covid, doctors are traveling to fewer educational events. You know, they used to go to those for, like, their continuing education. But they’re doing a lot less of that now. And tradeshows are down, too. Like a lot of other companies post-Covid, we’re trying to serve, you know, more customers with less headcount.

After that, some of our products really are not feasibly sold online. They’re tens of thousands of dollars. Some of them have sales cycles that usually last 2 or 3 months for us. So, you know, that’s always a challenge for us. Lastly, a big piece of our advertising was through trade journals and publications. So, you know, dentists would get quarterly or monthly journals and publications.

And we used to get a good amount of business through that. And it’s just, you know, not happening anymore. So back in 2022, we were working with a local ad agency up in Buffalo, and they were doing some social media work for us. And, you know, and trying to think of new ways to advertise.

We looked to them to implement a, sort of like, an AdWords campaign, sort of like a pilot program. Right away, it wasn’t great. They had quite a few missteps. Incorrectly configured campaigns. They didn’t do a great job of researching keywords. Some of it ended up costing us thousands of dollars for traffic that wasn’t even applicable to what we were doing. Beyond that, they had almost no e-commerce experience, which really hurt. And then even worse, they had no Magento or Adobe Commerce experience.

So that led to problems with, tracking conversions, tracking goals. And it was just kind of a mess. And lastly, we felt like they just weren’t doing a great job learning our business. You know, it’s really complicated. B2B is its own animal. So we just weren’t happy. So back in 2016 at Mage Titans in Austin, Texas, I actually met Meg and Dave.

So with all this going on with our account, I reached out to them and I said, hey, can you guys have a look? And I’m going to turn it over to Meg, who can talk about what she saw.

Meg: Thank you. (How do I advance is it this one here? Adam: It’s the big one. Meg: Oh, okay. Thank you, Adam.) I’m Meg with Psyberware.

So my team handles a lot of the setup of ad accounts and a lot of the day to day operations. I’m just going to take you through our process at a really high level of how we took over the Great Lakes account, to structure their account in a way to give them some really fast results and set them up for future growth.

So the first thing, we do when we take over any ad account is really try to figure out where we’re going to put all of our energy and set our focus. We’re going to learn everything about the company and their industry, and we’re going to do a full audit of the account and take a look at the history and figure out what worked and what didn’t work.

And then we’re going to take some quick action to stop some of the bleeding. So in this case with Great Lakes, the account was performing very poorly. So there really wasn’t a whole lot to preserve, or salvage. So we actually turned most of the account off and dropped the spend nearly, almost all the way to zero.

So the next thing we kind of did was find the low hanging fruit. And for Great Lakes, that was pretty easy. They had definitely had some broken conversion tracking. So our team went in and fixed that right away. We also decided to set our focus on the product side of the business and just leave laboratory aside for now.

All of those 3000 SKUs that they have were all readily available online for purchase on their e-commerce site. So that was just a low hanging fruit that was easy to advertise right out the gate. The other decision that we made was that we decided to kind of put all of our eggs in one basket and focus just on Google Ads.

For starters, we really wanted to get solid there, even if at just a low level of spend, which we would ramp up. We wanted to get solid, scale it up, and then consider if we would, move on to other platforms from there or how to expand from there. So the next, the next thing we did was set a structure for the account that was going to work well.

So because the previous account was performing very poorly, when ramping up an account from nearly zero, the strategy there is really to try to consolidate a lot of the campaigns into a single campaign. So a single search campaign, a single shopping campaign. And the idea there is that consolidating that data helps Google’s algorithms perform just a little bit, it helps them train faster is what it does.

So there wasn’t much to preserve on this account, but what we were able to preserve, we combined into a single search campaign, and then we would later build that up. We also set up dynamic search ads. And that helps us mine for search term data, and that helps us later to figure out how we’re going to build out the account and which product lines to, to push.

We also set out, set up a single Performance Max campaign to advertise the SKUs that they had available in their product catalog. So of course, this structure is going to morph over time. And, we’re going to ramp up spend slowly as it morphs. So we’re going to do things like, you know, we split out the brand keywords into their own campaign and other decisions we made along the way as we had more data and we built up the account.

So but I want to point out that kind of just by structuring this better, we were able to turn the account around and achieve some really fast results. And they were highly profitable in the first month, even after accounting for ad costs.

So once the structure’s in place, then we can really fine tune things. So there’s a few things that we did with this account. We set up, tracking for online conversion actions like lead forms and phone calls. And those tend to carry a really high average order value for this business. We also recognize that they have products with various, like a diverse, price points and product margins.

Right? So like Adam said, they sell everything from rubber bands for braces to high end 3D scanners and printers. So what we did is we organized the Performance Max campaigns, broke them out into multiple campaigns and tiered them into a structure grouped by profit margin. So what we can do is we can bid more aggressively on high margin products and a little bit more conservatively on the low margin.

We also, had an opportunity since they do have a lot of expensive, high end high margin products that are actually exclusive to Great Lakes. We could take advantage of promotion assets as well and squeeze just a few more sales out of that. And the last point here I want to say is we weren’t working with a rigid budget.

We had a lot of flexibility. So, that’s kind of important as we can flex the budget throughout the year with the opportunities that we’re given. So we could push more in their busy seasons when, like I say, dental offices tend to restock products and then spend less in the slower months.

So the biggest driver of success, like in advertising isn’t really in doing like these big projects or like getting distracted by like, you know, sexy new features, right? It’s really the nerdy stuff. It’s in staying on the path, getting your nose to the grindstone and being consistent and having these steady incremental improvements over time, that’s going to maximize your conversion value.

It tends to be really labor intensive, but it’s those small improvements over time that actually have a compounding effect. And that’s what happened here with Great Lakes as well. So our team was in there, you know, running routine processes daily, weekly, monthly, watching the data, fine tuning things, as we go. And from the data we learned where to push and where to expand keyword targeting, how to build out ad groups, asset groups, and new campaigns, all while expanding the budget very gradually.

And also all while steering in the direction that helps support the internal priorities over at Great Lakes. So I’d like to pass it to Psy to talk about the technical integrations.

David/Psy: Thanks, Meg. Okay, so.

In the era of AI, your data quality and your data integrations are some of the most important things for achieving advertising results. Data quality is key, and this is an area that most merchants can make improvements. And obviously we had a lot of improvements to make with Great Lakes. So right off the bat, Meg said, we fixed the normal conversion tracking in Google Tag Manager.

We got things worked out there. So that was much more accurate. And that helped to drive a lot of those initial results. But one of the key decisions we made was to very quickly implement Google’s API based enhanced conversion tracking. So we connect in via the Magento 2 Rest API and read new order information as orders come in. We pass that information in a privacy safe way over to the ad platform.

We’re able to fill in gaps in the conversion tracking from tracking blockers or just bugs on the front end that could occur in people’s browsers. So this is a technique to just make conversion value tracking a little bit more accurate. A lot of times you get an extra 5% accuracy, 10% accuracy, 2% accuracy. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s enough.

And that causes a snowball effect over time of helping the machine learning models train better and better about what’s working and what’s not. We also did a lot of work around their shopping feeds. So again, most Magento merchants don’t actually really take advantage of all of the attributes that are available to them. And in the case of Great Lakes, we fleshed it out quite a bit since they have these very technical products.

We used a lot of the more recent additions to the Google product data specification, such as the the product highlight attribute. This is an attribute that allows you to put some unique selling points or key features, like bullet point lists about your products. We will take that information out of Magento, push it over into Google Merchant Center.

That can help with keyword matching, and it helps with the display of product data on platforms like shopping dot google.com. Another attribute that we implemented right away is the product detail attribute. The product detail attribute is kind of like a super attribute that allows you to extend the product data specification with any attribute you want to cram into it.

It’s a way to pack a lot more structured data about your products and pass that information to Google, and it can definitely help with people who are searching for long tail keywords and very specific products. Particular technical information can help Google match those searchers to the right products. Definitely increase conversion value over time. Conversion rates.

So last one I’ll talk about is cookie-less tracking. Cookie-less audiences. So in in the Wayback Machine, we would all set cookies on people’s browsers so we could track them over time, add them to audiences, and target them in the future. That’s how we’d set up remarketing audiences for past purchasers and people who visited our website.

So these days, it’s a lot more blocking going on there. And there’s issues with third party deprecation that’s constantly in the news. We set up, first party data audiences where we’re syncing information about customers out of Magento. So we’re actually taking the real past purchaser information, and we’re creating audiences based on that over in Google Ads. In addition to that, we’ve set up, first party data audiences coming out of Klaviyo.

And one thing that people often don’t think about is that when people unsubscribe from their email lists, they didn’t necessarily opt out of your advertising. So sinking unsubscribe lists can be a useful method to create audiences so you can communicate to people with advertisements when they don’t want to have emails in their inbox. So to talk about results and next steps, I’m going to pass it back to Adam for a minute to give us an overview of what how the year looked.

Adam: Yeah, yeah. (So give me a click here. There we go.) So for the last year, up through current, nine of our past 12 months were record months for e-commerce sales for us. And a lot of that was due to ads and shopping. You know, we had some amazing years during Covid.

You know, there’s a lot of money being spent. But nine of the last 12 months have surpassed that. Our e-commerce revenue is up 6% this year. And again, that’s where, you know, other parts of the company are, you know, not reaching that level of revenue. And then our ROAS has been unbelievable. We’re getting, 20x ROAS.

You know, as I mentioned, we’re an employee owned company. And our employee owners really couldn’t be happier. So when I pass back to Dave for our next steps.

David/Psy: Right. So just to wrap it up real quick, last slide here. So we’re planning on doing some steady expansion this coming year as budgets allow. And a lot of people might think we would expand to other platforms like Meta or LinkedIn for a B2B business like this.

But we’re actually probably going to do Microsoft Ads next. The thing to think about with Microsoft Ads is it works really well when your customers are in a managed I.T. environment with locked down Windows computers, and that describes pretty much all of health care, definitely dentist offices. So there’s a lot of the searches for these sort of products go through Bing and can be targeted through Microsoft Ads.

In addition, Google has a beta program right now that is to allow bidding based on gross profit margins of individual SKUs. Right? So once this, profit maximization bidding strategy comes out of beta–we don’t know when that will be, but probably sometime in this next year–we plan on implementing that. We can get much more precise bidding down to the SKU level and adjusting those bids to really try to maximize profitability on every item.

The last thing I’ll say is we want to really expand what we’re doing with the lead generation side of the business, the B2B sales that require a salesperson to close things, or the more complicated sales that are going through the laboratory division where we want to support that side of the business with more advertising support as well.

There’s some more challenges there about how you actually track the sales that ultimately occur, especially on a multi-month timeframe. You know, you can’t use traditional optimization methods with conversion tracking for that, but that’s where we’re going to be going next in order to support the business even more and help them grow. So that’s all we’ve got today.