How we reduced Campaign Costs by 66% and filled the Stores of a well-known Furniture chain
Due to the numerous sensitive data reported in the article and attested by the actual dashboards we will see below, the name of the client company cannot be mentioned.
The company
Investing in online advertising campaigns does not mean selling exclusively online. Online marketing activities, in fact, are also critical to boosting sales that occur offline.
As in the case of this client of ours, a well-known furniture company, which chose to rely on PrimePPC to spread its online promotions and increase the number of customers who go to its dozens of stores scattered throughout Italy.
Results? Extraordinary campaign performance and, most importantly, full stores.
But how did we do it? Let’s go in order.
The challenge
The company, like many others of this size, had relied on large consulting firms for years.
The main goals pursued up to that point had been pure awareness . The goal was to get the ads displayed to as many people as possible, or at most get as many clicks as possible. It was then not considered whether these clicks were then actually interested in the promoted offer, or not.
The metrics on which the evaluation of the results was based were ad impressions and the number of clicks.
Of course, these metrics are of relative value when the real goal is to get customers into the store.
Spending a budget in the tens of thousands can prove very easy if we want to get impressions and clicks cheaply, just think of all the placements in children’s apps or YouTube videos for toddlers, Millions of views and accidental clicks completely off-target. But if they are ‘sold’ to the client company without making it fully aware, they can make the campaigns appear successful when they are actually failing.
Our partner Keeping Ad , who was already supporting the client in the overall online marketing strategy and Facebook campaign management, saw untapped potential in Google campaigns and contacted us to try and improve the results.
Solution
User tracking
First, we took action by configuring all the necessary tracking to record and analyze user behavior once they landed on the site, something that had never been done in the client’s account before.
We determined that the key KPI for judging the effectiveness of the campaigns was the visit to the point-of-sale search page. Since there was in fact no real e-commerce on the site, where a product could be purchased, this was the most advanced conversion the user could make.
In fact, as we describe in more detail later in the article, we were able to go even further by implementing an advanced tracking system that allows us to know how many users then physically went to the store.
With this conversion data, we were able to begin informed optimization of campaigns.
Knowing which keyword, or which display advert brings the audience most interested in visiting the store, is essential if you have only one goal in mind: bringing money into our customer’s coffers.
In addition to this we also need to monitor how users behave once on the site: whether they go to view products or ask for information, whether they visit pages for 2-3 minutes or leave after 1 second effectively making us waste the 0.25€ paid for that click.
Not all web users and not all clicks are worth the same for any particular business , and our job is to find the ones that are worth the most to our client.
The structure of the campaigns
After an extensive and detailed analysis of the keywords used by users to search Google for the products offered by our client, we proceeded by completely restructuring Google Ads campaigns in Search Network and Display Network.
We divided the campaigns into Brand campaigns (those searching for the company’s name in Google) and “generic” campaigns (those searching for terms related to “sofas,” “beds,” “kitchens”), then further specified by search subcategories.
This activity, combined with other advanced techniques, has led us to achieve excellent keyword quality scores (which, translated, means decreasing costs and getting more clicks with the same invested budget).
Campaign landing pages
A campaign set up perfectly in Google Ads cannot bring results without a landing page (so-called landing page) made with certain characteristics.
Investing in campaigns to send users to web pages that are not optimized for the company’s actual goals (bringing users to the store) can be an ineffective use of the advertising budget. We then optimized the landing pages, first with simple tweaks, then with deeper revisions.
The optimization
It almost never happens that you get off to a flying start with all the perfect campaigns; to achieve your goals, you need to analyze and optimize your campaigns over time.
That is why one of the key activities of PrimePPC’s Method* is precisely to continuously analyze the results to intercept what works and what does not work in the campaigns, continually correcting the shot to get to the end goal of maximizing the return on investment.
The enormous potential of Google MyBusiness
Having dozens of stores spread throughout the country, it was crucial to properly manage all the Google MyBusiness profiles of each of these stores as well.
As a first step, they were then claimed to be managed under one account and linked to Google Ads. In this way, we were able to add location extensions for each store.
Location extensions enrich Google ads by allowing users to easily phone the store or get directions to it.
In addition, by linking these Google MyBusiness profiles, and the significant flow of customers into the stores, we were able to have concrete and irrefutable data on the effectiveness of our campaigns. In fact, Google Ads allows you to see the number of people who saw the ad and then:
- They physically visited the store
- They phoned the store
- Have clicked to view directions
- They visited the website
How are visits to the store tracked? Simple, thanks to the location detected by users’ mobile devices, totally anonymously of course.
Results
These were the results before the start of the collaboration with PrimePPC. In this report we can see how the campaigns had resulted in 143,651 clicks to the site, with an average Cost Per Click of 0.32€. It was not possible to determine what the return on investment of these clicks was since no tracking was installed on the site.
What you see above is the report provided by the agency that used to follow our client before, the KPIs in this case focused on Impressions, Clicks and CTR (ad click rate).
PrimePPC Results
Below are the results with PrimePPC tracked by Google from July to September.
The average Cost per Click was 0.12€ (reduced by 66%). In addition to sharply reducing the cost per click, the campaigns resulted in visits from highly targeted users (in fact, a study of the customer-type was carried out before the campaigns were created, and the goal of the campaigns was precisely to intercept this type of user), you see in fact the number of conversions tracked (denoting user interest behavior).
Also note the division of budget across different tools, Search campaigns, Display Banners, Video and local Point of Sale campaigns, all part of an ecosystem set up with our Synergistic Method.
Thus, in these 3 months (July-September) the company achieved:
- 182 million ad views
- 943,000 clicks to the site
- 80,496 conversions
- 52,000 conversions are from people who visited the stores page to find the nearest store
Below we see an overview of the last 8 months, with a lowering of both Cost per Click and Cost to Reach One Thousand people.
While pursuing performance objectives – that is, ensuring that users search for the nearest point of sale and physically visit the store, therefore not necessarily having low-cost clicks but rather having quality ones. the Cost per Click of campaigns has been reduced by up to 66 percent compared to the campaigns run by the big agencies that came before us. Although, we reiterate, the sole objective of the previous strategy was precisely to reduce the Cost per Click as much as possible.
We went from 0.25€-0.40€ per click to 0.11€-0.13€.
This means that with the same budget, the client company was able to get 66 percent more clicks. Or, to get the same number of clicks, he could have invested 66 percent less.
In addition, the CPM (Cost to get 1,000 ad views) had an incredible reduction: 6€ to 0.60€. A decrease of 90%!
This means that with the new campaigns made by PrimePPC, with the same investment of €10,000 (example), the company can get 16,666,666 views, 10 times more than before.
The company, on the strength of these positive results, doubled the advertising budget dedicated to Google Ads in the following months.
The tracking of physical visits to the store
Keeping Ad’s continuous and valuable collaboration has also allowed us to increasingly optimize campaigns and the message of the ads, being able to have direct feedback on the results of digital campaigns in physical stores.
What we are most proud of, however, is the tracking of physical visits in the store, enabled in Beta version by Google in our client’s Analytics account. This is a new technology that uses the locations of site visitors’ mobile devices to detect, within a specified number of days, whether they have gone to the physical locations registered in Google My Business.
With this metric, we have a complete picture of the results and can even calculate the cost per final conversion in the store.
In the graph below we see the number of conversions in the last 3 months of 2019:
“Visit Shops page”= 32,356
“Store search”=60,222
Total= 92,578
In the graph below we see Google’s tracking of Store Visits in the last 3 months 2019:
“Store Visits”= 23,122
We calculate the conversion rate:
23.122/92.578= 0,25
Between those who visit the website’s point-of-sale page and those who then actually go to the store, we have a 25% conversion rate.
That is, 1/4 of users who search for stores on the site then go to the store within 30 days.
Having the data on cost/conversion for store search from the site equal to 2.52€ and conversion rate per physical store visit equal to 25% we can calculate that it costs us about 10€ to bring a store visit.
If we wanted to then exclude Brand campaigns (i.e., those users who were already searching for our client’s brand) and take into account only those campaigns that converted an audience that was generically searching for the product the cost per point of sale search rises to 3.7€ and we would see that the Visiting the store costs us €15.
With point-of-sale data we know that 20 percent of store visits end with a sale so we can say that in the first case a sale costs us 50€ in the second case 75€. We have thus come full circle.
Very interesting data, right?
Below we can also see the visit data for each single point of sale.
YouTube campaigns, or how to appear on TV intelligently
Another remarkable result we achieved was to have our client’s commercial appear on TV for a few thousandths of euro.
That’s right, with an investment of a few hundred, our client’s Branding video was viewed 36,604 times on Smart TV (as a spot on YouTube). Equal to about 0.008 for each display of at least 30 seconds!
Form over substance
Instead, these are the types of reports PrimePPC provides to its customers (the data reported is not from this case study). KPIs are displayed in a way that is simple and relevant to our client with curated graphics.
Morale
What does this case study teach us?
We were able to sharply increase the results of a large furniture chain, compared with previous campaigns run by two of the largest web agencies in Europe. We are proud of this but also concerned about all the entities that unconsciously entrust their marketing budgets to those who are not focused on bringing results.
What we promise at PrimePPC is to work with useful, shared, measurable goals and to ensure the highest possible results for Pay Per Click campaigns.
How about you? Are you sure you are making the most of your advertising budget?
