Google Ads is effective in creating demand for a product or service. It is an effective online sales tool. It is with this goal of the client that we worked on in this case.
Read on how over 19 months of cooperation the ITForce team contributed to the Client's income growth by 14 times.
1. About the Client - online furniture store
The Client contacted ITForce in January 2021 with the task of setting up contextual advertising. The main goal was to increase sales on the website.
The Client is IKEA of Sweden furniture reseller. A license to sell the IKEA brand is not required.
The assortment of the store includes furniture, lighting, home accessories, and other goods under TM IKEA. Delivery is possible under the order on an advance payment. Usually delivery is within 10-14 business days.
The website of the Client is made on the Prom.ua platform.
2. Setting up ads for IKEA furniture reseller
Before the cooperation with ITForce, our Client had an experience with contextual advertising. The configured campaigns worked for 1 month. The results of that month were not bad (105 transactions).
Fig. 1 - Client pre-advertising information from Google Ads
This is not enough result for the furniture sales niche so the Client came to our agency.
At the very beginning of our work, we optimized Google Ads advertising campaigns. For this we:
- created a Google Analytics account;
- set its identifier in the prom.ua admin panel;
- linked Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts;
- set up goals in Google Analytics and imported them into your Google Ads account;
- enabled the E-commerce option in Google Analytics and checked the data transfer.
The first stage of work in building a paid advertising strategy is the semantic core collection. That is queries by which users aka our potential customers will find our Client's website on the Internet. We collected search queries for advertising using Keyword Planner and grouped the keys in the PPC Tool.
The Client's store is located on the Prom.ua platform, which greatly simplifies the installation of Google Analytics, setting advertising goals, and uploading the product feed. We are certainly working with the Merchant Center to diagnose products and improve the feed with conversion rules.
The furniture sales niche is highly competitive because furniture is not an impulsive purchase. Therefore, we must remember this and give users time to think about purchasing a product.
The Client already had experience in launching paid advertising, he had a standard Shopping setup. Our task was:
- setting up Smart Shopping campaigns (because they give the best result);
- data feed optimization for advertising;
- setting up a search campaign with keywords containing the IKEA brand - our Client falls into the category of resellers, and this type of seller does not require a sales license.
We also had to invest in the Client's budget for advertising (about 1200 UAH/day).
The main direction of the Client's online store is the sale of IKEA of Sweden brand furniture. We have an advantage that should be emphasized due to the popularity of this brand and the lack of stores in Ukraine.
So we created a search campaign with keywords that included brand names. We also made sure that "IKEA" was added to the titles of the product feed, after which we also included users who intended to purchase a popular furniture brand. So we were able to increase the effectiveness of advertising at the very start.
The goals that we set up at the beginning of the work:
- Adding to cart.
- Order via cart.
We added the Transactions goal after setting up eCommerce for Google Ads revenue tracking. Over time, add-to-cart and order-through-cart goals were removed from Google Ads, as we used them to collect conversion statistics when training bidding strategies.
Within a month of launch, the Brand Search Campaign was discontinued as it was ineffective. We also stopped the standard Shopping because Smart shopping pulled impressions over itself.
Going forward, the team decided to work with standard and sensible shopping campaigns as they delivered the best results in terms of transactions and conversion values.
Ad examples:
Fig. 2 - Example of ads
Fig. 3 - Examples of ads on Youtube
Advertising launch regions: Ukraine except for Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and partially Zaporizhzhia regions.
Optimization measures that we are taking today:
- we regulate the budget of working advertising campaigns depending on seasonality;
- testing new advertising strategies;
- we set up additional campaigns because the Client's assortment includes such products as garden furniture (pools, children's swings, hammocks, etc.).
By seasonality. We worked on the principle with these categories of goods:
- set up a standard shopping campaign;
- cleaned queries so that the campaign learned to get more relevant traffic and collected data (this is about 30 conversions per month);
- switched to a reasonable campaign.
When working with a standard shopping campaign to optimize it, we made adjustments by the device (much more conversions are made from mobile than from desktop or tablets), and less often by geo (in Smart Shopping and Performance Max, such changes cannot be made since standard and smart shopping is better suited for project promotion.
Fig. 4 - Traffic to the Client's website from all devices
Regarding the creation of smart shopping campaigns: we have improved the feed with products, namely, we have added a custom label attribute with a breakdown by product price.
Each store has profitable and not-so-good products in stock, therefore, in order to increase the average bill, we excluded goods with a price of < UAH 1000 from running campaigns. And they created a separate campaign with goods of UAH 500-1000. We also moved all the top products to a separate Smart Shopping campaign. These actions have shown their effectiveness.
Our constant activities:
- disabling products with high costs without conversions;
- exclusion from impressions of geos with a high cost per conversion;
- adjusting the budget and strategies;
- monitoring products in the Merchant Center and checking the feed;
- cleaning search queries in Shopping campaigns;
- elaboration of recommendations to improve the account quality score.
Our team immediately began testing a new type of Performance Max campaign when it appeared in Google Ads which allows you to place an ad on all Google ad spaces within one advertising campaign. The test showed that Performance Max should be offered to our Client.
By the time PMax was introduced, it was already known that it would be better to create a separate data feed for Performance Max campaigns so that PMax products do not overlap with Smart Shopping products, and also do not intercept each other's impressions.
Considering that Smart Shopping ceased to exist on September 16, 2022, we agreed with the Client that the ITForce team will make a smooth transition from the Smart Shopping campaign to Performance Max so that this does not affect the results in the future.
We watch and analyze the work of Performance Max campaigns. We plan to update creatives and add audience signals.
3. Deliverables of contextual advertising
Whether our settings work? Moreover, there was a break in March 2022 due to the war in Ukraine — the Client put the project on pause. We resumed cooperation only in April, that is advertising didn't work at all for a month. Let's see if we managed to return customers to the website and how successfully we did it.
First, let's look at the overall picture of the configured campaigns: we take the period 01/27/2021-09/27/2022.
Fig. 5 - Customized campaigns from 01/27/2022
In general, advertising brought a significant number of orders to the Client.
Comparing the indicators of the beginning of cooperation (March 2021) and the last month of campaigning (September 2022), we note that:
- the number of users who came to the site through advertising increased by 142.07%;
- the number of transactions (purchases) increased by 430.66%;
- the Client's revenue increased by 1315.24%.
Fig. 6 - Comparison of indicators September 2022 and March 2021
The Client's most profitable campaign, Smart Shopping, was set up from the very beginning of the project. Currently, it brings in most of the income from all contextual advertising.
Fig. 7 – Comparison of Smart Shopping metrics September 2022/March 2021
At the same time, we managed to increase the average order by 196.69%.
Fig. 8 – Average order receipt (comparison September 2022/March 2021)
We coordinated all changes in the account and campaign budgets with the Client, the interaction with which was quick. This made it possible to instantly respond to the suggestions of the Google Ads system for advertising and bring them to life.
So, Google Ads helped us:
- attract new users to the website;
- paid advertising has become the main channel for attracting users;
- increase conversion and the Client's income.
Fig. 9 – Organic and Paid Search Traffic
Our work allowed the client to increase transaction revenue by 1315.24%For 19 months of running advertising campaigns (January 2021 - September 2022).
ITForce was able to achieve such a result only if the Client agreed to promptly make changes to the advertising settings. And remember that buying furniture takes time to approve the purchase decision. Allow time for a Client to make a purchase decision when setting up advertising.
upd. 2.11.2022 How Performance Max campaigns currently work, read p. 4 of the article Як перейти зі Smart Shopping до Performance Max.
