Imagine you need to create a personalized ad campaign where your audience will see non-repeating creatives for 20 days. Sounds like a big project for the design team, right? But automation works wonders and we set up such a campaign in a few hours with the help of a designer and an analyst. In this case, Traffic Manager newage. Oleksiy Krupko will tell how we set up a campaign for Yakaboo with Google Marketing Platform tools, and what results we got.
Tasks and Challenges
Our client is a national book platform with a wide range of Ukrainian and foreign paper, electronic, and audiobooks of various genres. The client wanted to increase traffic to the site and the number of transactions among existing and new users. The advertising campaign related to English-language books and lasted for the duration of the promotional offers on them. Among other things, our task was to attract new customers to buy books in English.
Our Approach
We offered to test personalized ads that would offer the audience new selections of products every day. We used personalized appeals to men and women, and each day the set of books we promoted changed. That is, every day for 20 days, men and women received a new selection of 3 books.
The division of books into “women’s” and “men’s” is conditional and was formed based on the client’s statistical data. We also segmented the audience depending on the position on the customer’s journey. We used two audiences from those who intend to purchase the product (custom intent) – those people who googled “buy a book”, “buy a book in English” and searched for the names of popular writers. And also used the audience of in-market book fans.
For each of the segments, we have prepared book proposals, which are mostly aimed at a certain audience by article.
Tools
We configured and launched the campaign directly in Display & Video 360.
We used Google Studio (formerly Google Creative Studio, part of GMP) to create personalized creatives. We started a feed with individual books that changed depending on the gender and preferences of the viewer. In addition to the books, the headlines, background and CTA on the button were changed on the creative.
We also marked up the campaign with Campaign Manager to evaluate the result not only by clicks, but also by delayed post-view conversions.
Automation allows you to redirect time from tedious work for robots to creative things that only a cool specialist can do. Earlier we told that we are still automating to do more and better at the same time: Automation in Digital. An advertiser that doesn’t use automation loses.
Result
During the 20 days of the campaign, we collected 3.1 million views for the client with a viewability of 61%. At the same time, the cost of showings was much lower than predicted.
Thanks to the decrease in CPM, we exceeded the plan for reaching the audience and the number of impressions, but at the same time the costs of tracking the campaign increased. This difference turned out to be significant and once again reminded that low CPM and high reach are not as valuable as the real performance of the campaign in terms of conversions. To show the effectiveness of Google Marketing Platform tools, let’s compare the results of this campaign with the parallel one in Google Ads.
Google Marketing Platform Tools VS Google Ads
In parallel with our campaign, the client continued to use their standard banner ads in Google Ads. We got better conversions to purchases over the same period of time using Creative Studio. Our campaign generated 7.6 times more purchases than a Google Ads campaign. The CR of this campaign was 9 times higher, while the cost of attracting a purchase in our campaign was 5 times lower than in Google Ads.
Most of the purchases and “Add to cart” conversions in our campaign occurred on delayed actions – post-view. And a significant part of purchases was made from devices other than those on which the buyer saw the ad — 8-9% of conversions were cross-device.
Client’s Review
“newage. specialists offered an interesting campaign, which, at first glance, would require a large investment of time. But thanks to the automation of creatives in Google Studio, we quickly prepared 20 days of unique advertising content. Such a non-standard approach and focus on data-driven solutions are the strengths of the agency”.
If the issue of creative for advertising is relevant for you, read our article “How do you know which creative works best? Test.”
