Optimization of an Advertising Account for e-Commerce
About the project
The cooperation of Webnauts with the online store of mobile accessories «Bilka» has been going on for quite a long time. We maintain the site, systematically conduct SEO optimization, implement new visual solutions and continue to promote the client in accordance with the trends of modern e-commerce. Through collaborative work, a few years ago the site «moved» to a newer content management system (CMS) and rose to the top for a number of popular requests.
Defining problems and setting goals
There are a large number of showings and clicks on ads, but at the same time, few purchases are made, and the cost of conversions leaves much to be desired. This means that with an average cost of goods, the client receives a low profitability of its advertising campaigns.
After a preliminary assessment of the problems, we decided to perform an analysis and find the cause of the drop in profitability. And after that, optimize the advertising account and increase the profitability of investments, while not reducing the overall income of the online store.
Stages of optimization
Even the most thorough approach to launching a new campaign does not guarantee maximum effectiveness. The daily work of a contextual advertising specialist is to analyze, parse statistics and optimize current search advertising.
Actions performed by our digital marketer:
Analysis of existing campaigns.
We found that most of them are broken into too small groups that work with expanded text ads. By the beginning of our work with the account, there were more than 30 working campaigns in it with detailing of the «campaign-group-ad» type for a specific phone model. At first glance, everything is correct. But at the same time, costs continue to increase and conversions fall.
Definition of campaigns that do not bring profit, but only «drain the budget».
When analyzing the account, we chose campaigns with a 0 profit indicator. We analyzed purchases for half a year and turned off 13 advertising campaigns that did not reach full payback during this period.
«Pull-up» ad optimization
They are a kind of showcase where goods and services are displayed. The more relevant and engaging the ad, the more likely it is that potential customers will click on it. To quickly evaluate the performance of your ads, you can sort your ads by CTR or conversion statistics, just like keywords are sorted.
That way we can find out:
- Which ads get the most clicks;
- Bring more conversions;
- Have the best conversion rate;
- Provide the lowest cost per conversion.
In our case, the percentage of responsive ads in the remaining campaigns was less than 5. Therefore, we decided to create responsive ads. As a result, expanded ads remained working while the optimization process was in progress.
Since product groups and categories contain a lot of «broken keys», all ads had to be brought to the minimum «average» quality level for showings. As a result of the work done, the groups began to receive more clicks. In addition, we created one headline per ad with keyword auto-suggestion, which is vital for the most relevant ads.
Cleaning campaigns together with the client
The account indicators began to grow, but the cost of conversions grew along with them. It’s a shame, isn’t it? Therefore, we decided to revise the campaigns for compliance with «requests – sales relevance». To do this, you need to compare search queries for consumables and running campaigns. To make the work more efficient, we asked for help from our client. As a result, we sorted products according to the «relevance-availability» indicator and turned off campaigns for brands that did not have requests for consumables. A few days later, the cost of conversions began to decrease significantly.
Transfer to dynamic search
After some time, we realized that we do not have time to update the keys and filter search queries. The reason for this is a large assortment. The fact is that the model range of each manufacturer is very large, and the number of products is constantly growing. Therefore, we decided to create dynamic search campaigns based on page indexing in Google. A week later, products with regular search were completely disabled, and all remaining ones were switched to dynamic search.
Change of strategy
The most effective way to change is to use an automatic strategy.
This option sets the daily budget. Then AdWords spends it to get the maximum number of clicks or conversions, that is, to achieve the indicators set for it.
Despite fears of taking over the world by artificial intelligence Skynet, we admit that machine algorithms today work better than humans. Fearing for our future (but wanting to help the client), we made adjustments and saw that the cost of conversions in commercial campaigns began to gradually increase. We checked all the other campaigns and found that most of them worked on manual bidding.
After all the work was done, we started testing intelligent strategies. After a week of such tests, it was decided to switch the entire account to smart bidding – the campaigns began to «learn», and we carefully observed. As soon as the machines said «enough», our marketer decided to test the knowledge of new students and see the results of the work done. It turned out that the problem with the cost of conversions appeared again. Therefore, we decided to test the strategy with a «target ROAS level».
As a result, we were able to stabilize conversion rates.
Working with commercial campaigns
The account was already running a commercial campaign that had not been edited for a long time. Therefore, we created and launched a test version with a given percentage of return on investment. To the joyful cries of our marketer, it began to bring results within three days after the launch.
After the test, we decided to smoothly raise the budget of the created campaign and switch the existing one to the same bidding strategy.
In addition to the described actions, we made adjustments aimed at maintaining the account. These include adjusting negative keyword lists and changing ad spelling.
The result
As a result of our work, there are 2 commercial campaigns and 11 with dynamic search, periodically leading in terms of low cost per conversion and profitability.
If we take two periods of account operation, at the time of making adjustments and a year before, we get the following statistics.
The account has reduced the number of non-targeted clicks and conversions, which will include a lot of bounces. In addition, there was a 20.5% improvement in return on advertising investment, a 13% increase in ad revenue, a 9% reduction in budget spend, and a 33% increase in conversion rates.
The work done by us shows how, using minimal funds and accumulated experience, to increase the profitability of advertising campaigns in a short time. Of course, this case is individual and each project requires an individual approach and analysis.
Webnauts will gladly take on the most complex and interesting tasks.
