Case Description
- Analysis of the client’s Google Ads account
A short description of the running ad campaigns at the beginning of the project:
- only classic search ads worked
- standard shopping ads weren’t segmented
- standard display ads weren’t divided into audiences
- there were issues with dynamic remarketing and gathering audiences
- only Standard eCommerce worked
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- Optimization and scaling of advertising campaigns — Smartphones
2.1. Display advertising
We created a new campaign with a separate budget, and segmented the audiences as following:
- interested audience
- wide audience
- common audience with keywords
What the new ads looked like:
2.2.
Shopping advertising
Feed segmentation
There are over 15,000 items on the website that differ in price, brand, and popularity. From our experience we know that more affordable and more popular goods consume greater parts of daily budgets and ad impressions. To resolve this issue, we decided to work with shopping feeds. We selected segmenting goods based on the price to prevent cheaper goods from consuming traffic and budget and avoid reducing traffic for more expensive items.
Smartphones (shopping)
Segmenting into five categories based on prices:
- 0 to 4,000 UAH
- 4,000 to 6,000 UAH
- 6,000 to 10,000 UAH
- 10,000 to 20,000 UAH
- 20,000+ UAH
Campaigns:
Traffic growth over the period from October 2021 to June 2022, with a decline in February through April (the first months of the full-scale Russian invasion in Ukraine)
eCommerce implementation
Universal Analytics has two main methods of tracking results of eCommerce: Standard and Enhanced.
Standard eCommerce allows you to measure transactions and analyze purchase activity on your site or app. You can see product and transaction information, average order value, ecommerce conversion rate, etc.
Enhanced eCommerce adds additional functionality to standard eCommerce reports: you’ll know when customers add items to their shopping carts and when they complete a purchase. You can also use enhanced ecommerce to identify segments of customers who fall out of the shopping funnel.
The client had only Standard eCommerce set up, so we created a technical task and together with the website programmers implemented Enhanced eCommerce.
The results of shopping campaigns (October 2021 — February 2022)
Based on the data we obtained in the course of the campaigns, the best results as to queries, sales, and, consequently, conversions were driven by the Smartphones segment in the price category of 6,000 — 10,000 UAH.
Advertising during the war (May — July 2022)
At the beginning of the full-scale invasion on February 24 the advertising campaign was stopped, but, on the client’s approval, we started to gradually resume advertising activities at the end of April. After discussing it with the client, we switched ads off in the VIP and another expensive segment, keeping only the average price segment. Also, we highlighted supporting Ukraine and the Armed Forces of Ukraine in ad copies.
Shopping campaigns metrics (May — July 2022)
Dynamic Remarketing metrics (May — July 2022)
Since the advertising activities were resumed, the client has seen gradual growth in traffic and conversions.
In July 2022, we started the process of gradual switching from Smart Shopping to Performance Max campaigns with shopping feeds. As of now, the system has undergone all stages and re-learning and resumed the previous high-volume sales and income.
Generally speaking, we have been watching stable, dynamic growth of conversions and ads performance since we started to work on the client’s Google Ads campaigns. Also, the ads started to appear next to the competitors’ ads on the search results page while the cost per action dropped.
During the project, 2,411,619 UAH were spent on advertising campaigns for the Smartphones segment, which brought a total revenue of 246,505,290 UAH.
Conclusions and Recommendations
- advertising online stores is challenging and requires a holistic marketing approach, thorough investigation of the market, in-depth competition analysis, and developing custom strategies;
- it is worth focusing on Shopping campaigns with shopping feeds, implementing segmentation according to prices, categories, and product types;
- it is important to monitor transactions and revenue coming from advertising — for this, it is crucial to set up Enhanced eCommerce, gradually switching to Google Analytics 4 and analyzing all sources of traffic;
- it is vital to monitor competitors’ advertising and pricing, market trends, and seasonal fluctuations;
- by constantly optimizing advertising campaigns and performing A/B tests, you can control and scale advertising activities and grow conversion rates.
