The Challenge
For most chocolatiers, seasonality is the nature of the beast. From late autumn into spring, there is no shortage of sweet occasions built into the calendar: Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter, the biggest candy days of the year. But when school's out and the summer heat hits, chocolate quickly becomes an afterthought (unless accompanied by ice cream, of course).
Small confectioners like Stefanelli's temporarily lay off staff while cutting costs to survive the summer slowdown. Sometimes Google Ads budgets are part of the equation. In the summer of 2024, Stefanelli's ownership reduced their monthly ad spend from $3,000+/month to $1,000/month.
The Solution
To thrive despite the reduced budget, Epic aimed to put Stefanelli's products in front of a much more targeted audience, driving increased conversions and purchases.
Epic created a much more optimized list of search-based keywords, improved our ad quality, and used a Product Feed Method in conjunction with our Performance Max campaign feed. By focusing the Performance Max Audience on users who had already seen, visited, or clicked on Stefanelli's product previously, we were able to achieve a significantly higher ROI.
Results
In the spring of 2024, Stefanelli's paid search performance looked like this:
- Monthly budget: $3,000 - $4,000
- Average monthly impressions: 52,000
- Average clicks: 600
- Average monthly sales: 8
- Average CTR (click-through rate): 1.1%
- Average conversion rate: 1.3%
In spring of 2025, nearly a year since the budget cut, Stefanelli's paid search performance looks like this:
- Monthly budget: $1,000
- Average monthly impressions: 1,700
- Average monthly clicks: 1,200 (up 100%)
- Average monthly sales: 90 (up 1,125%)
- Average CTR: 70.6%
- Average conversion rate: 7.5%
While it took time to show recovery, a more targeted approach has yielded dividends for Stefanelli's ecommerce operations.
