How to Advertise CBD Products on Google Ads: Love Hemp

From July 2020 to January 2022, against all odds, we were able to successfully use the Google Ads platform to advertise Love Hemp cannabidiol (CBD) products. 

Over this 18 month period, we generated 4,146 transactions and over £196,000 in revenue for Love Hemp.

Why Can’t You Advertise CBD Products on Google Ads?

Advertising CBD products on Google Ads is notoriously difficult. Cannabidiol falls under the list of unapproved pharmaceutical and supplement products on Google, despite numerous studies showing that it is safe for human (and dog) consumption. It is even associated with a variety of wellness-promoting health benefits!

Nonetheless, Google currently takes the view that CBD products cannot be advertised on Google Ads. This posed us with a problem when we started working with Love Hemp in July 2020.

About Love Hemp

Love Hemp was founded in 2015 by former school friends Tony Calamita and Tom Rowland. Unhappy with the hasty and slapdash CBD industry, the pair created the company. Today, it is the UK’s leading supplier of CBD products with its award-winning range now stocked in over 2000 retailers across the UK, including Holland & Barrett and Boots.

Love Hemp has been built upon safety, quality, and transparency. It is fully certified, legal, and a member of the Centre for Medical Cannabis. For these reasons, the brand has continued to stand the test of time.

How to Advertise CBD Products on Google Ads

So, how did we go about advertising Love Hemp’s products on Google Ads?

We built a single-page site on a completely different domain with no reference to “CBD” or any of the CBD products we were trying to sell.

This single-page site had a link to the main site, which included Love Hemp products and clear references to CBD. Here, users could purchase their desired CBD products through one of our ads.

The Results

Our Google Search and Shopping campaigns yielded the following results:

July 2020 to January 2022 

PPC was essential for both acquiring new customers and ensuring that Google real estate was dominated by Love Hemp’s organic, paid search, and shopping ads results. Notably, CPA does not take customer lifetime value (CLV) into account. That is why we also conducted CLV analysis during this period:

• The average purchase frequency was 1.76.
• The average value per customer was £89.48
• Returning customers contributed 3.27 purchases on average and £178.02 in revenue.

Before the PPC campaigns were launched, the average purchase frequency was noticeably lower at 1.55 and the average customer value was £71.30 (25% less). PPC not only helped to drive new customers for Love Hemp but also bolstered CLV and purchase frequency.

Main Challenges

Products were often disapproved due to references to CBD, including the most popular ones, which impacted performance. To get these products up and running again, all references to “CBD” had to be removed from the product headlines and descriptions.

Despite this, Google still monitors everything and will sometimes disapprove products due to the product landing pages.

In turn, we had to constantly monitor the ads, products, and sites to ensure that no disapprovals slipped through unnoticed. We always reacted swiftly.

So, what tools did we use throughout this process?

Cross-domain Tracking

Cross-domain tracking is the process of passing the information stored by browser cookies from one domain to another.

We used this to track any user that clicked through our ad. From their initial keyword search onto the landing page to the checkout and thank you pages of Love Hemp’s main e-commerce site.

ShoppingIQ

ShoppingIQ is a shopping ad campaign creator that understands your business’ unique goals, challenges, and requirements. They can:

• Set up Google Shopping feeds.
• Assist with campaign setups.
• Review the campaign once implemented to identify any room for improvement.

When you list products with ShoppingIQ, it is in real-time. Therefore, when a product did get disapproved, we were able to edit it and get it live straight away again. Specifically, we would “duplicate” products but use different product IDs and a modified title. This tricked Google Ads into thinking that the edited products were “new”.

If we were not using Shopping IQ, products would have stayed disapproved for longer periods of time or indefinitely, thus significantly impacting performance.

The platform also allowed for easier testing of titles, which were able to be updated instantly and then reviewed to determine which title structure performs best. For example, we tested different placements of flavour, bottle size, and CBD strength in product titles.

Is Your eCommerce Site Losing Out on Sales and Conversions?

We are professional problem-solvers at Trafiki. We specialise in conversion-focused solutions that are specially tailored to the eCommerce world and, more importantly, your specific industry.

In this instance, we used our Google Ads expertise to navigate the CBD industry’s tricky digital landscape. Previously, we have circumvented Google Ads’ ban on face masks by fast-tracking the whitelisting process for companies. Whatever the industry is, the result is always the same: a dramatic increase in sales and ROI.

If you are interested in finding out just how much more revenue you could be generating, click here to contact Trafiki today. From PPC to SEO to UX, we have all facets of your digital marketing strategy covered.