In six months, our team at Adlucent grew revenue for a large, well-known electronics retailer by 60% year-over-year (YoY).
They were facing steep competition and declining performance on Paid Search, while losing traffic, struggling with low-margins, and wasting precious ad spend.
Today, we’re sharing exactly how it was done using an optimized PPC strategy.
The trick? Restructuring their account to better match the products and goals of this electronics retailer.
Let’s dig into the mechanics for how this was done.
Restructuring to Drive Results
In order to uncover important insights and drive-needed performance gains, we restructured the client’s Product Listing Ads (PLAs) and search accounts to make each more granular.
The goal was to create a granular structure for our retailers’ products, which follows Google’s taxonomy to better assist matching products to search queries.
Let’s draw this out with an example, so you can see what we’re aiming for when we arrange a granular structure.
If you sell baby and toddler undershirts, you wouldn’t just want to classify all of your undershirts under Apparel & Accessories > Clothing.
You’d want to segment granularly into smaller product groups such as Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Baby & Toddler Clothing > Boys Baby & Toddler Undershirts.
Another reason to utilize a granular category structure is to take advantage of grouping like-products together.
For instance, the electronics retailer’s product targets were structured based on brand, so they were grouping freezers and gas ranges together. This overly promotes broad matching by Google, which erodes click-through rates (CTRs), quality score (QS), and increases your cost-per-click (CPCs).
Seeing the problem here?
Don’t get me wrong, broad match keywords are certainly important as exploratory terms, and we did have to add Top of Funnel (TOFU) terms to ensure they were being competitive, however, broad match terms should be used strategically. This is because broad match terms are matched to the widest range of search queries so they typically have the lowest conversion rates as they generate the least qualified traffic.
This approach naturally leads to lower CTRs, which is largely what QS is based on. Below is a screen shot of the electronics retailer’s PLA grouping before we made it more granular…
Structuring for Product and Branding
Next, we restructured the electronics retailer’s PLA account using product types built from the optimized feed attributes. Restructuring accounts based on product types and brands will help you identify new opportunities for growth.
For the electronics retailer, restructuring their PLA account based on product types and brands opened up new opportunities to grow traffic, resulting in a 63% increase in traffic and 48% increase in revenue. This was accomplished with a very minimal increase in CPCs, but resulted in a 49% increase in converted clicks.
Here’s a look at how we reorganized their PLA…
To improve search results and ensure the electronics retailer wasn’t losing valuable traffic to competitors, Adlucent focused on previously underutilized TOFU search terms and aggressively leveraged top products and categories.
As we mentioned earlier, while it’s not ideal for the majority of an account to be focused on TOFU terms, you do need to ensure that you show alongside your competitors for high-level queries as it’s important for brand.
You can check your impression share in AdWords using the competitive metrics, as illustrated in the screen shot below. Here, you can see Search Impression Share, which will give you the number of impressions you’ve received, divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.
To identify top products and categories, begin by analyzing Total Conversion Value in AdWords…
Next, to improve PLA campaigns, we expanded the feed of eligible products, tapping into categories that had previously been ignored because their bids were too low, or their feed quality did not meet Google’s requirements. In doing so, the whole feed of eligible products were able to show and could be used for advertising.
AdWords Geo-Targeted Campaigns
We found products that could only be sold within a certain number of miles around a physical store location due to manufacturer agreements and the store shipping policy. To include these products in their feed, we created geo-targeted campaigns to promote them within a specified geographic radius of their retail store.
Google AdWords enables advertisers to target (or exclude) ads to customers within a specified geographical location, or radius around a location. These geo-targeted campaigns are ideal for reaching consumers near brick and mortar store locations.
Because efficient growth was a primary goal of the electronics retailer, the team was able to reduce wasted ad spend and increase conversions by isolating SKUs with high-click volume but low conversion rates, and giving them high priority ID targets with low CPCs. This ensures that when Google shows product ads for those particular SKUs, it will be at a low bid.
To do this within AdWords, create a report that filters SKUs with a low conversion rate, and sort by highest to lowest clicks. This will provide you with a list of high priority SKUs to target.
Mobile and Desktop Campaigns
Next, after finding that higher average order value (AOV) items were more frequently purchased on desktops, but that bids were being penalized by the total performance of desktop and mobile traffic, Adlucent created new campaigns to manage mobile traffic separately from desktop bids.
The last improvement was made to the electronics retailer’s overall search strategy. By increasing bid frequency, along with investing more in high margin products, the retailer’s non-brand mix grew by over 10% YoY.
In six months’ time, restructuring the search account to capture more TOFU search queries led to increases in…
- non-brand search traffic of 43%
- CTR of 68%
- revenue of 139%
- AOV of 49%
This was accomplished while also decreasing CPCs by 29% with a very minimal increase to cost.
Restructuring the PLA account based on product types and brands opened up new opportunities to grow traffic resulting in…
- 63% increase in traffic
- revenue increase of 48%
- 49% increase in converted clicks with a very minimal increase to CPCs
Not bad for a few months worth of work, right?
