PPC Management Service for the online store of computer equipment and components from Europe

Description of the work

Contacting a digital marketing agency is advisable and has advantages, even if you understand and know how to set up contextual advertising.

Benefits of hiring an online marketing agency:

• agency specialists have significant experience working with paid advertising in various niches and know how to effectively use PPC tools to ensure the best results;
• contacting an agency will allow the owner to focus on developing and optimizing the business and improving the marketing strategy.

That is, contacting an Internet marketing agency will allow the business owner to get a greater and better effect from setting up and running advertising than working with it himself.

Our Client had this situation - he worked with contextual advertising at a fairly successful level. He wanted to improve the effect of advertising - reduce the cost of conversion and increase sales. For this purpose, our Client contacted ITForce in March 2021. The reason for choosing our company is reviews and recommendations on the Internet combined with ITForce’s significant experience with e-commerce projects.

1. The Client – a store of computers and components from Europe

Our customer is the owner of a store with equipment and gadgets compbest.com.ua. The main and most popular product is used computers from well-known brands at a reasonable price.

Our Client benefits:

• 7 years of experience in the computer market of Ukraine;
• 2,000+ reviews on the website from clients;
• 30,000+ completed orders;
• 75% of customers become regular customers;
• Technical support is available 7 days a week;
• status of a reliable Prom.ua seller;
• variability of order payment (payment of goods upon receipt, installments or payment in installments);
• 6 month warranty with the possibility of extension upon purchase;
• free delivery of orders by courier;
• exchange/return of goods within 14 days at the buyer's request, regardless of the reasons.

Product advantages of the Compbest store:

• high-quality used computers at reasonable prices;
• the assortment includes first-class computers from Austria, the Netherlands and Germany;
• only proven models of computers from well-known brands that meet the high business standards of the countries in which they were used.

Computers and laptops offered by Compbest undergo detailed diagnostics before being included in the product catalog. Every important PC component (processor, RAM, hard drive, video card and motherboard) is tested. A stress test of the equipment is performed under maximum load. These procedures allow for maximum verification of the functionality of devices before sale.

2. Setting up Google Ads advertising

Cooperation with the Client has continued since March 2021.

Advertising in a Google Ads account for cooperation with ITForce

The history of changes in the account is available for the previous 2 years. That is, our period BEFORE is December 2020 - February 2021. At that time, the following worked in the Client’s account:

• search campaigns by product categories and manufacturer brands;
• search brand campaign;
• dynamic remarketing;
• Google Shopping;
• Smart Display on the Display Network.

Let us remind you that the business owner set up all these advertising campaigns with his own hands.

At the beginning of work in March 2021, the ITForce specialist set up:

• Smart Shopping for TOP products;
• new dynamic remarketing campaign;
• campaigns in KMM;
• campaign against competitors;
• search campaigns for segmentation of product category, geo, product condition.

Regarding the advertising budget. The Client’s main KPI is the cost per conversion in each campaign and the demand for the store’s products. We started working with a budget of 150,000 UAH for all configured campaigns. Over time and the development of the account, the budget increased.

We used the most important advantages of the client in the advertisements.

Examples of customized ads:

Fig. 1 – Search and advertising on the Display Network

The advertisement worked properly and met the KPIs set by the Client. Since February 2022, the customer decided to maintain the context independently. Our cooperation resumed in the summer, in July 2022. The Client contacted us with the goal of optimizing existing campaigns.

However, the owner of Compbest noted that our pre-advertising settings worked perfectly. This is confirmed by the fact that at the time of the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the campaigns set up by ITForce showed significant results - the Client had an almost monopoly on impressions. That is, as of July 2022, specialists received all campaigns with our settings. And this is our period BEFORE optimization.

Fig. 2 – Advertising will run during June-July 2022

Data available from advertising:

• 106880 clicks per ad;
• 504 transactions;
• +20.3% to the average order value (according to our data);
• 38.3% – income from contextual advertising.

We conducted an audit of campaigns and determined an optimization work plan:

• processing search queries;
• adding negative keywords;
• adjusting budgets if necessary;
• development of system recommendations;
• adding responsive search ads and titles to them to improve ad quality scores;
• analysis of work and adjustment of bidding strategies;
• disabling low-performing campaigns/ad groups if necessary;
• extracting geos with unacceptably high conversion costs;
• disabling high-cost products without conversions/with high conversion costs if necessary;
• optimization of search LCDs according to certain criteria;
• segmentation of shopping campaigns (Shopping);
• setting up and launching Performance Max campaigns.

Performance Max campaigns are new. They showed excellent results on some of our Clients' accounts. We decided to test their work in the account of our customer Compbest.

What we know about Performance Max:

• this is a new type of smart campaigns that allows you to display ads in search, Display Network, YouTube, Google Maps and Gmail;
• PMax work on autostrategies;
• instead of ad groups, groups of objects are used, consisting of images, headings, descriptions, videos and products (subject to adding a product feed from the Merchant center);
• The principle is similar to how responsive ads work: the system tests different combinations of objects and shows the most effective ones.

Now you can create PMax without adding objects when using a product feed in it. It is believed that in this way the operating mechanism is closer to reasonable trading campaigns. Regardless of whether you use a product feed in your campaign, you'll need to add a few headlines, descriptions, images, and logos to your campaign. That is, we provide the system with options for ad elements, after which it tests different combinations of them.

PMax takes precedence over trading companies. How to make both Shopping and PMax appear simultaneously:

• add a duplicate feed to the Merchant center;
• change the identifier attribute through feed conversion rules;
• Mark both feeds with the seller tag.

Then Shopping and Performance Max will be shown in parallel, each feed in its own campaign type.

For example, this is what ads look like:

Fig. 3 – Examples of customized ads

We regularly test hypotheses and our current work with advertising concerns:

• adjustment of strategies (the business owner cares about the conversion price and the transaction value/expense ratio);
• redistribution of budgets in favor of more cost-effective advertising campaigns;
• changes in price ranges for products that will be displayed in Shopping;
• experiments with keys

Let us remind you that our client has experience and knows how to set up contextual advertising independently, works with data and Analytics. We provide weekly reports on the work performed and the client also provides weekly comments and responses to the approval of our proposals. Listen to our recommendations, we work as a team (sometimes with the Client’s programmer and content managers) to solve these problems if some misunderstandings arise. This is an example of trust and healthy business relationships that produce great results.

So we first set up a general Performance Max campaign across all products in the client's store. And only after it showed acceptable results, a campaign was created for a separate product category. Currently, the overall PMax LCD demonstrates some of the best performance in the account.

Services we use during our work:

• Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager – setting goals.
• Google Analytics/Ads – viewing indicators and reports.
• Keyword Planner – collection of semantics.
• Notepad++ – to simplify working with product data files from Merchant Center.

All these tools simplify and help a PPC specialist’s work.

Google Ads for a hardware and gadget store from Europe

Let's see the results of our settings: whether we managed to achieve the KPIs set by the Client.

How to work in a competitive niche

The niche for selling used equipment and gadgets from Europe is very competitive, because there are a large number of stores that offer a similar range. Our Client has an excellent reputation and brand requests work.

We monitor the dynamics of advertising campaigns on a weekly basis and make suggestions for changing strategies and adjusting the budget. We also analyze geography, advertising display accessories, time, and demographic data. This is painstaking work that requires maximum attention to detail and analysis of the operation of advertising campaigns.

Changes in the market have a great impact on the performance of advertising - in the absence of changes in settings and stable dynamics over the past periods, sometimes you can observe a decrease in the effectiveness of the account as a whole. The effectiveness of advertising for used and new products also differs. Plus, there are products that are cheaper and have a lower average bill (as in any business), for which the acceptable cost of conversion is more than 2 times lower than the average in the account.

Traffic channel data.

Fig. 4 – Distribution of traffic to the website between channels

So far, contextual advertising is the main channel for receiving visitors and orders. And after optimization work has been implemented into the client’s advertising account, it is the context that provides the greatest income.

Organic events (via search) take 2nd place; the top three is completed by referrals from social networks.

Let's see what the most common path users take to complete a transaction.

Fig. 5 – Multi-channel conversions

That is, most often, after entering a query into the search, the user switches to a search ad and thus ends up on the client’s website, where he places an order. This channel is search advertising.

Or, after viewing the site, the user saves the product page as a browser bookmark and after a while visits it again and makes an order. This is a direct conversion channel.

Making a decision to purchase a product from a consumer takes some time, because some technological items cost above average (more than the average order receipt). Therefore, we have a delay in transmitting transaction data to the account and must take this into account when analyzing performance for a certain period.

Since the account runs a significant number of campaigns and at the same time has a sufficient daily advertising budget, it is of great importance how large a database of negative keywords we were able to collect. We can say that 95% of queries in reports are relevant, which is explained by systematic work in this area.

Let's see the results of advertising after optimization:

Fig. 6 – Account transactions for August – September 2022

Results of contextual advertising for August-September 2022:

• 168865 clicks per ad;
• 929 transactions;
• 44.3% – income from contextual advertising.

Now let’s compare the periods: August-September and June-July 2022.

Fig. 7 – Comparison of advertising performance for August-September / June-July 2022

• 57.99% – increase in clicks on advertising;
• 85.66% increase in advertising costs;
• 17.51% – increase in cost per click;
• 57.66% growth in users who saw advertising;
• 61.13% increase in the number of sessions (i.e. some users clicked on ads several times);
• 84.33% increase in the number of transactions;
• 121.74% growth in advertising revenue.

Let's look at the data on the audience that was interested in our Client's ads.

Fig. 8 – Audience data

That is, with an increase in the budget, we received more ad impressions, ad clicks, new interested users in general, and an increase in the number of transactions. And this is precisely what we sought to increase the number of orders and, accordingly, the client’s income. These indicators cannot be achieved without increasing advertising costs.

We also have a stable share of orders from regular customers - their number is slightly more than a quarter of all users. This is also an audience that regularly returns to the website. This means that our advertisements fully respond to their requests.

In total, as of September 2022, we had 22 configured and launched campaigns. Let's take a look at the performance of each separately compared to the previous period.

Fig. 9 – Metrics for each campaign

We see that the most effective transaction campaigns are:

• search (68.02% conversions);
• Smart Shopping accounts for 21.96% of transactions;
• Performance Max ranks 3rd in account efficiency (3.34% of transactions);
• Shopping campaigns bring in 3.02% of sales;
• dynamic remarketing provides 1.51% of transactions;
• DSA campaigns generate 0.97% of sales.

So, we managed to achieve the KPIs set by the client - customized advertising brought an increase in sales. The cost per conversion of each campaign is acceptable to our client, and when it goes beyond that, we adjust the campaign settings to reduce the CPA.

We continue to work on target queries, negative keywords and system recommendations in the account. If necessary, we redistribute the budget and change the bidding strategies for the client’s advertising campaigns. Our work is still ahead.