For many years, a medium-sized retailer focused largely on the internal running of their business, so Google Ads had become overlooked as a tool to generate new sales. They regularly invested in traditional marketing such as print and radio out of habit, and would often spend $5,000-$10,000 for a 2-day ads in Melbourne and Sydney weekend newspapers. The concept of Google Ads made sense to the retailer, but they were sceptical of its ability to generate a measureable return on investment. They had gaps in tracking, from website visit to showroom visit, which made it difficult to understand the true source of showroom walk-ins and sales, so the retailer contacted Calculate Marketing to enquire about a profitable Google Ads strategy which could deliver measurable long-term results.

Summary

Highest sales volume in 23 years

How I helped

The huge variation in the types of searches made by people shopping for outdoor furniture (price, quality, function, size, colour, style, material, location) meant that an extremely long-tail strategy, consisting of almost 500,000 unique ad messages, could help the retailer stand out from the competition by sufficiently catering for the varying needs and requirements of 1,000s of searchers:

• 88 campaigns
• 40,957 ad groups
• 122,814 keywords
• 490,762 ad messages
• 8,188 negatives

The vast majority of sales coming from showroom drop-ins made it impractical to accurately track sales back to their original referring source (keyword, ad message, search query etc), so softer engagement metrics were instead set up to better understand visitor engagement and likelihood of showroom visit. These secondary engagement metrics were then fed back to the campaigns to help measure, optimise, and refine the Google Ads strategy.

Campaign results

A highly-tailored long-tail strategy and alignment of the campaigns to help maximise visitor engagement led to a significant increase in average page views, time on site, contact page views, showroom locator searches, online enquiries, and return visits. Compared to the previous year:

• Contact page views rose by 134%
• Showroom page views rose by 139%
• Online enquiries rose by 88%
• Return visits rose by 79%

Due to the more targeted nature of Google Ads traffic, Google Ads out-performed Google organic, direct traffic, and Facebook referrals on all meaningful engagement metrics:

• Over 12% longer time on site
• Over 13% more page views
• Over 23% higher chance of contact page view
• Over 20% higher chance of online enquiry
• Over 8% higher chance of return visit

Client results

Although these metrics suggested Google Ads was working well on paper, the true success of the decision to invest print and media budget into long-tail Google Ads marketing only really became evident when the retailer recorded a record year of sales:

• Highest sales volume in 23 years

Confident that online activity was crucial for offline sales, the retailer undertook more creative Google Ads strategies such as audience pipeline remarketing (showing different message themes at staggered time periods), and RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads), which targets previous website visitors as they later make more generic furniture-related searches on Google. Due to the strong seasonal variation of outdoor furniture, different strategies have since been developed for each quarter, to better align messaging and click budgets with each season, and to maximise sales when the Spring arrives and customers rush into pre-Christmas panic.

If you’re a bricks and mortar retailer looking to use online marketing to increase your offline sales, please get in touch for more information.