PPC Case Study: How to Increase Sales in the Online Store During the Lockdown

Many online marketers habitually classify PPC ads as a tool for boosting direct sales. However, this type of advertising can be an effective means to increase brand awareness. In this article, we share the case of a premium audio equipment retailer from the UK.

Client

Premium Sound is a Hi-Fi & home cinema equipment retailer represented with a chain of offline stores within the United Kingdom.

Tasks

• increase sales in the online store during the lockdown caused by COVID-19 and the closed offline stores;
• reach positive profitability of advertising campaigns.

Initial Data

Before contacting Promodo in February 2020, the retailer’s team did very little to their online platform. There was an attempt to launch the advertising campaigns but, in the end, the cost of conversion exceeded the AOV by 2.5 times. The brand’s priority continued to be their offline stores until the COVID-19 pandemic and the temporary closing of the offline market for several months changed everything.

The Promodo team needed to increase sales through the online store, but also achieve positive profitability of advertising campaigns.

Solution

The premium music equipment market is a specific niche with its own characteristics. The AOV for the majority of brands represented at the Premium Sound online store starts from £1,000. The decision to purchase can take up to six months, both offline and online.

Before launching advertising campaigns, we visualized a customers journey from getting acquainted with the company to making the decision to purchase and divided it into five stages of the marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, and retention.

To immediately interact with customers who are ready to place an order, we focused on the three stages:

• consideration (deferred demand),
• preference;
• purchase.

We developed an advertising strategy that included the correct analytics setup and the launch of several digital tools at once.

Setting up end-to-end analytics and launching advertising campaigns

Before launching advertising campaigns, our team reconfigured the project analytics. This helped us in the future to make the right decisions on scaling the advertising campaigns. To achieve accelerated data processing and further scaling, we used BigQuery.

The developed digital strategy was implemented thanks to the launch of:

• Smart Shopping

• DSA campaigns

• Dynamic remarketing in Google Ads

• Search campaigns for priority brands
• API+XML search model campaigns

As a result, we used DSA campaigns, search campaigns for priority brands, and dynamic remarketing to handle the consideration stage that generates deferred demand and Shopping campaigns, we also used API + XML for direct sales (the preference and purchase stages).

After ad campaigns were live for some time and it was possible to track their effectiveness, we abandoned the search campaigns since the CPC was significantly higher than in our API+XML campaigns.

API+XML is the Promodo’s in-house tool for automating bulk advertising campaigns.

With a broad breakdown of keywords, the tool allows us to get the maximum possible amount of relevant traffic from model campaigns. Flexible ads’ customization makes it possible to more accurately convey all the advantages of a product and a store while answering a specific request.

Work during the lockdown period

At the end of March, when the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic started for the UK, the retailer had to close all their offline stores. At this point, we already knew which online advertising campaigns worked best, so we gradually began to scale them.

This allowed the retailer to grow the income and transactions in relation to March by 615% and 315% respectively, while the budget was increased by only 35%.

During the lockdown, we bet on the existing offline customers to actively placе their orders online. In addition, in April we managed to achieve 640% ROMI. This allowed us to start advertising products with higher margins, increase budgets, optimise Smart Shopping and the API+XML campaign.

Results                                                                                

Our tasks were to both boost sales and increasing the retailer’s brand awareness.

Many online marketers habitually classify PPC ads as a tool for boosting direct sales. However, this type of advertising can be an effective means to increase brand awareness.

Using Google Ads allowed us to increase branded traffic on the Premium Sound request by 221%. In addition, we managed to double the AOV and increase the number of transactions by 75% since the launch of the ad campaigns.

What's Next?

• Launching Social Media Ads
• Building the brand’s media presence (YouTube)
• Launch advertising in the other EU countries

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