Contextual Advertising to Promote Online Furniture Store

Client

Online furniture store

According to the NDA, we cannot disclose the name of the project.

Services

Contextual advertising

Subject

Furniture

Period under review

July through September

Features

About the company: an online store that sells modern factory-made furniture. The company produces furniture for living rooms, hallways, bedrooms, kids’ bedrooms, etc.

According to the client, the previous contractor paid little attention to the effectiveness of the advertising campaigns. The client was generally dissatisfied with the work performed, because the cost of attracting one lead exceeded $5, and the number of leads did not exceed 200 per month.

The results of the audit of the advertising campaigns have shown that the previous contractor did not monitor cost per action, poorly analyzed keywords, advertising campaigns, and ads. No actions were taken to optimize advertising campaigns.

We decided to reconfigure contextual advertising to increase conversion rates and make cost per action acceptable to the customer. One of the crucial factors for the client was to scale the business, i.e. to promote new product groups through contextual advertising.

Goal 

To double the request rate for clients who come through contextual advertising and decrease cost per lead up to $3.5.

The lead was considered a unique call or an order placed through the shopping cart. Other actions on the site such as viewing the contact page or click-to-call were not considered a lead.

Work performed

• Studied the main competitors, pricing policy, and competitors’ USP.
• Conducted a demand and supply analysis for each product group advertised.
• Developed a promotion and pricing strategy for each advertising campaign.
• Agreed and approved the budget for each advertised area.
• Analyzed the target audience. While analyzing and managing advertising campaigns, we developed a general conversion buyer persona.

Target buyer persona:

– Aged 25-34

– Gender: female

– Interests: furniture, renovation, books, household goods, children’s products

– Time-of-day conversions: 10am – 3pm

– Devices: smartphones

• Established goals for tracking conversion events on the site, set up e-commerce.
• Set up the Call Tracking service to track calls.
• Went through the current advertising campaigns:

– Built and grouped a list of keywords, then classified them by different match types locking stop words and word forms to further evaluate their effectiveness.

– Advertising campaigns were divided by type (search, networks, remarketing conditions) and region of display for efficiency and proper budget allocation.

– Focused on the quality of elaboration and relevance of ads.

– Adjusted advertising campaigns based on the target buyer persona.

– Added possible extensions and additions.

• Created various user segments for remarketing in order to personalize ads depending on a website section.

The following conditions were met:

– visited a particular website section

– viewed more than 3 fly pages

– added an item to the shopping cart but didn’t buy it

– proceeded to checkout, but did not buy the item

– CRM databases

– etc.

Each segment was divided into subsegments based on the number of days since the last visit, taking into account behavioral indicators (refusals, time on site, page depth, etc.). Users who visited the site less than 3 days ago were prioritized over those who were on the site more than 15 days ago.

• Used the Look-alike tool for CRM databases and for the most effective user segments.
• Adaptive, graphic, and text-and-graphic ads were used to attract users.

The final structure of advertising accounts in Google Ads is shown below:

Structure of advertising accounts

Result

The following results were obtained in Google Ads during the period under review:

• Impressions (search / networks): 192,134 (44,629 / 147,505)
• Clicks (search / networks): 13,186 (12,154 / 1,032)>
• CTR (search / networks): 6.86% (27.23% / 0.7%)
• Cost (search / networks): 2,204.15 USD (2,092.36 / 111.79)
• Avg. cost per click (search / networks): 0.17 USD (0.17 / 0.11)

Google Ads Results

During the period under review, the Call Tracking service obtained the following data:

• Number of calls: 3,830
• Number of unique calls: 1,632
• Avg. number of calls per day: 42.56
• Avg. call duration: 81.43 sec.

Call Tracking

Number of unique calls

For the period under review, the Google Analytics service obtained the following data:

• E-commerce conversion rate: 13.44%
• Transactions: 213
• Revenue: 34,635.93 USD
• Avg. order value: 162.61 USD

E-commerce

Final result

>As a result of a 3-month contextual advertising, the following results were obtained

Cost

Cost in Google Ads: 2,204.15 USD

Conversions

Number of calls: 3,830

Number of unique calls: 1,632

Number of orders placed through the website: 213

Pricing indicators

Average cost per click (CPC): $0.17

Average cost per mille (CPM):$11.47

Average cost per lead (CPL):  $1.19

Summary table

Contextual advertising performance indicators

According to the client, the average conversion rate from call to purchase is 25%.

Number of purchases through unique calls: 1,632*25% = 408

Number of orders placed through the website: 213

Avg. check (e-commerce): 162.61 USD

ROI = (return on investment – amount invested) / amount invested * 100% = 4481.39%

CPS (cost per sale paid from advertising sources) = amount invested / number of purchases = 3.55 USD

Summing up

During the period under review, various promotion strategies and hypotheses were tested in order to maximize results, namely:

• The target audience was segmented down to what brands of mobile devices and browsers the user comes to the site from and makes a conversion.
• Certain advertising campaigns (ACs) at the night rates were launched. The priority of impressions for ACs in the morning was increased according to the terms of remarketing.
• Various options for ads in both search and networks were tested. New ads were built on the basis of more effective ads, whereas ineffective ones were turned off.
• Segments of similar users (Look-alike) were created based on ready-made segments and CRM databases.
• Targeting was used only for platforms with the highest conversion rates in the display network.
• ACs were optimized to be better adapted to conversion bidding strategies.

As a result of the work completed, the following results were achieved:

• The average cost of attracting a unique lead decreased from $5 to $1.19 or by 76.2%.
• The average number of unique leads per month increased from 200 to 621 or by ~ 310.5%.
• Contextual advertising effectiveness (ROI) is 4,481.39%

The client ultimately received enough targeted leads for further nurturing at a reasonable cost.

We are planning on using new advertising formats in the future (DSA, search remarketing, search banner ads, etc.), targeting new audiences, and taking new creative approaches.