Contextual advertising for a flower shop in Canada

Our Client is the owner of a flower delivery business with an office in the capital of Canada. The Client came to us with a ready-made advertising account in Google Ads and already configured advertising campaigns for his online flower shop in Ottawa. This account had a setup conversion tracking and imported the Transactions from the e-commerce report from the Google Analytics account.

Thanks to flexible customization of new campaigns and maintaining those that have already been set, we have reduced the cost of conversion by 72%. Price per click dropped 3 times, budget 2 times.

Flowers are an irreplaceable attribute of many holidays and mourning. In big cities such as Ottawa, competition between flower shops is fierce. Large chains are available in several cities at once. They are actively working to attract clients on the Internet, as ordering fresh flowers online is cheaper and faster than looking for a florist nearby.

This being so the owner of a small flower business needs well-tuned contextual advertising, which will bring maximum profit at a minimum cost.

The Client came to us with this issue. The task he set is to reduce the cost per conversion to 20 CA$ and below.

Coming up, we'll tell you how we solved this issue and achieved prices that were almost half the optimal price for the Client. Our cooperation began in March 2019 and continue nowadays.

1. Business specific

We have analyzed the benefits of our Client and developed a comprehensive promotion strategy based on them.

The Client helped us in this - he shared with us the specifics of this business.

According to him, large chain stores are competing. Such as Teleflora and FTD. They process orders, provide sample photos and redirect them to local florists. Because of this, everyone has the same range of flower arrangements.

In our Сlient's store, flower sets photo is taken independently. They also think over the design, packaging, postcard and content. In stock and a unique offer - flowers in a box:

Fig. 1 — The flowers in the box look really elegant, right?

Our Сlient's advantages:

• always fresh flowers;
• the cost of flowers is cheaper than that of competitors. Since the client directly cooperates with farms from Ecuador, Colombia, Thailand, Italy, Australia and with local suppliers.
• delivery takes place on the same day. And most importantly, it is free - on the website, buyers see the final price, while competitors' prices are indicated only for a bouquet.

2. Setting up and optimization

The Client came to us with a ready-made advertising account, with already running search campaigns, installed analytics, and configured e-commerce report in the Google Analytics account.

Read on to learn how we managed to optimize the process and reduce costs while minimizing traffic losses.

The Client insisted that already running campaigns should be continued to work. Therefore, we were also engaged in their optimization, namely, we tracked the effectiveness, based on which we made changes to:

• bidding strategies and device adjustments;
• ad texts;
• removed duplicate keywords;
• worked on search queries (constantly correcting the semantic core).

We changed not only existing projects, but also started creating new ones to structure the Client's advertising account. For all the time we have created such search campaigns:

• a flower delivery campaign, as the most popular Client observation query was a request for sending flowers;
• campaign with shared keys by color (online flower shop, etc.);
• campaign for Occasions (wedding, birthdays, funeral, mother's day, etc.). Campaign by Occasions took place pointwise only for holidays;
• Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaign.

With a view to improving performance indicators, increase reach and number of conversions, we created the following campaigns:

1. Shopping campaign, later a smart shopping campaign (it uses smart bidding, without the participation of a specialist. Google Ads decides how, when and where to display ads from the shopping feed).
2. Dynamic remarketing (reminders to users what kind of bouquets they were interested in).

2.1 Targeting

Money on contextual advertising will be wasted without specifying a specific geolocation.

Geolocation of the Client's advertising campaigns before starting work with us:

• the entire territory of Canada;
• USA.

The analysis of the regions showed that advertising in them is not effective. Therefore, we decided to focus only on the region of Ottawa impressions - exactly where the customer was ready and could provide delivery on the same day.

The goal is to provide more ad impressions near the actual office address in Ottawa. 

Аналіз регіонів показав, що реклама в них не ефективна. Тому ми вирішили зупинитися лише на регіоні показів Оттава - саме там, де замовник був готовий та міг забезпечити доставку в той же день.

Therefore, a Smart Local Flower Delivery Campaign was created with the goal of visiting a store. We've added a bid adjustment for a 5 mile radius of the location defined in Google My Business for it.

This solution allowed us to reach a larger number of potential customers who saw ads on their mobile phones and PCs, on maps, and when looking for a flower delivery service in their area. 

2.2 Ad scheduling

Flower arrangements are more in demand during the daytime.

We considered this factor and set up custom time for ad impressions for the campaigns we've created.

The new time for ad impressions is from 07:00 am to 12:00 pm (most people do not sleep at this time).

This allowed us to exclude the cost of showing ads at night due to low demand.

3. Ads setting

We have reflected all the advantages in the search campaign ads to make the context ad work for the Client. For this, we used the extensions:

• callout;
• phone number;
• links to other pages of websites;
• prices for arrangements, etc.

Fig. 2 — The ad contains both advantages and additional links to the website for convenience and better visibility of the ad

Рис. 3 - Приклад оголошення в пошуку зі структурованим описом, в даному випадку - з перерахуванням видів квітів

Fig. 3 — Example of a search ad with a structured description, in this case, listing the types of flowers

In Google Ads, search ads have been expanded for a couple of years and now have 3 titles instead of 2, and Google recommends filling them all.

There you need to describe the key benefits for buyers. This is what catches the eye first, meaning text in headlines plays a decisive role.

For the Smart Local Campaign (we described the setup instructions in the previous case), ads were configured with the store address and a call button so that customers could call the office and arrange for flower delivery in person. The Client's store address is also listed on Google Maps. This allows shoppers to understand how close the store is to them. Then they can come in and see the assortment of flowers live.

Fig. 4 — Sample ad for a Smart Local Flower Delivery Campaign

We described the benefits of using the Client's service because he always has fresh flowers and a large assortment of arrangements. This made it possible to achieve a significant increase in the number of interactions, which to this day brings income to the Client:

Fig. 5 — Growth in clicks and conversions during campaigns

3.1 Dynamic Search Ads

Google Ads provides tools for setting up dynamic search campaigns. They automatically determine the queries for which creatives will be displayed.

The system fills in the gaps in the lists of keys and displays ads on them based on information from the Сlient's website. Thus, the attention of an additional audience is grabed, one that is not taken into account in standard search campaigns, but which also searches for flowers, but not for high-frequency queries.

We filled out the description fields completely and this helped to attract additional attention and increase profits. All available extensions were also used.

Fig. 6 — URLs and titles are auto-generated (we've covered the main benefits below in the ad)

3.2 Special occasions

Flowers do not have a season. It is in demand for different reasons every day.

There are special occasions such as birthdays, weddings, funerals, etc. Such occasions happen every day: fresh flowers for the anniversary are needed immediately so that the buyer can please his loved ones on the same day.

We used all the reasons to interest potential customers:

Рис. 7 — Advertising with an appeal to call and buy an arrangement with free shipping on the anniversary

Other reasons for increasing demand are holidays. Competition is much tougher than usual on days like this. It is important to use the available advertising media correctly.

Both banners and plain text ads are suitable here, which we did as part of the promotion.

Mother's Day is considered a big holiday in Canada, which takes place on the 2nd Sunday of May. Accordingly, for every special occasion (Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Halloween), we launched spot ads that turned off at the end of the holiday.

Fig. 8 — Mother's Day banner

Smart display campaign with adaptations allows you to customize impressions and combine ad options without specialist participation.

The system itself generates ads from creatives (titles, descriptions, images) added when creating a Smart campaign in the Display Network. Ads also analyze the effectiveness of headings and images and shows the statuses: medium, low, high. This gave us the ability to adjust ad elements to improve their performance.

* We took images for responsive creatives from the Client's website.

Fig. 9 — Thanksgiving full screen banner

4. Cost optimization

After reaching the required level of conversions (about a month after the start), we decided to start testing the strategy for setting bids - Target CPA. It allows you to get the maximum number of conversions for a given price or less. 

The initial average cost per action for the account was at the level of 54-58 CA$ (agree, too much), but the algorithm was learning. And during our cooperation, we managed to reduce the cost of transactions by 3.6 times:

Fig. 10 — The graph of the change in the cost per action during the cooperation period

In fact, the cost per action began to reduce from the second month of work on maintaining.

But the main goal for us was not just to achieve the desired result for the Client. We needed to preserve the overall number of transactions and still increase the ROI. It took a while.

What did we get in the end:

• the cost of advertising has decreased by 2 times;
• the average CPC has reached 2 CA$.

Fig. 11 — CPC at the time of evaluation — 0.89 CA$

Important! In any experiment, when testing different campaigns and bidding strategies, we always stayed within the budget set by the Client.

5. Remarketing and dynamic remarketing

We launched remarketing and dynamic remarketing campaigns in order to enlarge the advertising campaign.

It so happened to show ads to those who have already shown interest in the Client's products:

• we have added all website visitors to the remarketing lists;
• dynamic remarketing lists include all visitors, past customers, those who viewed the assortment, and those who added an item to the cart but did not complete the purchase (cart abandoners).

6. General optimization

The peculiarity of optimization is regular testing and an integrated approach. We constantly “kept our finger on the pulse”.

Pay attention to both “day to day” work:

• processing of search queries;
• updating ads, the texts of which always corresponded to current promotions and occasions;
• updated the Pricing and Promotion extensions;
• tracked performance not only at the campaign level, but also at the keyword and ad group level;
• carried out a mandatory analysis of analytics, indicators of ROI in the context of campaigns.

So and more global moments:

• bidding strategies - if you made changes, you always clearly track the dynamics of the campaign to which the strategy was applied. The emphasis was made not only on the target metric for the client (conversion cost), but also on other metrics (traffic, conversion rate, conversion value, cost per click, etc.);
• tested different hypotheses to improve performance, such as: types of campaigns (campaigns in the Display Network for the audience of interested users and by intent, Smart Display campaign, Gmail, Smart Shopping campaign, Smart local campaign), bidding strategies (Maximum conversions, Target CPA, Target ROI), budgets, etc.;
• we also took into account the linguistic peculiarities of Canada - the presence of 2 civil languages. Despite the fact that the client only has an English-language version of the site, we did not want to lose users who enter queries in French. Therefore, we tested the campaign with French keywords and English ad texts.

Auction statistics data showed that the campaign received 76.23% of impressions - of which > 90% were impressions at the top of search results:

Fig. 12 — Competitors in auction statistics (campaign with French keys)

7. Return on investment (ROI)

ROI shows how much advertising pays off. During the campaign, we achieved the following indicator:

Fig. 13 — Increase in profit by 3.5 times

The total value of all transactions increased by 120%:

Fig. 14 — Change in conversion value (period March 2019 - April 2020)

The cost per conversion has decreased to 11.44 CA$ and has changed over the entire time as follows:

Fig. 15 — Cost at the beginning of cooperation (March 2019)

Fig. 16 — Desired action cost for April 2020

Due to the package of works on maintaining the advertising account as a whole, regular and clear interaction with the Client, his readiness for experiments, and constant analysis, we have achieved a 72% reduction in the cost of conversion.

Fig. 17 — Change in e-commerce indicators for March 2019 and April 2020

When comparing the start of cooperation (March 2019) and the last month of campaigning (April 2020), the following changes also occurred:

• the transaction rate (percentage of sessions ended by e-commerce sessions) increased by 71.9%;
• the number of transactions (made purchases) increased by 146.2%;
• the average order value increased by 31.6%.

Conclusions

Thanks to the interaction and receiving regular feedback from the Client, his flexibility, understanding of the specifics of contextual advertising and the willingness to test different tools, we managed to reduce the monthly advertising budget for online flower delivery in Ottawa.

We built a working strategy that made it possible to reduce CPA even with a limited budget. We coordinated all actions and results with the Client.

Our work allowed the Client to increase transaction income by 350% while reducing advertising costs by 50% for 14 months of active advertising campaigns (March 2019 - April 2020).