Ada Gianneskis and Karolina Mizan work at furniture brand House Market. This is a part of the group, operating IKEA stores and e-shops in Greece, Cyprus, and Bulgaria. Gianneskis leads communications and marketing as the brand’s communication director. Mizan is a digital marketing team leader also responsible for online advertising and search optimisation.
The way people shop for furniture in Greece has changed drastically. Customers today seek convenience, opting for online shopping and furniture stores closer to home, such as local shops and supermarkets that have recently started offering furniture items. Additionally, consumers are also becoming more cautious about non-essential purchases, like furniture, due to rising food and utility prices.
For large retailers like ours, this means it’s becoming more challenging to attract customers to both our online and physical stores. Our big blue box locations may be seen as being too far away as people gravitate to shops that are close by. And, as many Greek consumers browse our products online before making in-store purchases, losing online traffic impacts both online and offline sales.
Capturing new search behaviour
To increase website visitors, we revamped our strategy in partnership with performance marketing agency Kinesso, aligning it with how people search for furniture today.
“Everyone in Greece is highly aware of the Ikea brand, but home furnishings purchases are not a top priority in general,” explains Christos Keramidas, Performance Strategy Director at Kinesso. “We wanted to engage consumers browsing for furniture, even when they’re not specifically looking at Ikea.”
Together with the team at Kinesso we, at House Market - “Ikea Greece”, analysed search data from keyword planner and Google Trends. This revealed that Greek consumers are increasingly searching for products on a room-by-room basis, such as "living room furniture" or "bathroom furniture". While this trend was not entirely new, we observed a notable increase in the average monthly search volume in the first quarter of last year.
To ensure our ads would show up for these new search queries, we turned to broad match. This is a Google Ads setting that, as the name suggests, takes a broader approach to matching relevant ads to people’s search queries.
As a large retailer, we have a wide range of products, making it challenging — and a lot of work — to create specific keywords for each item. Broad match helped us match for a much larger range of relevant keywords than we could ever have provided manually.
For example, with the broad match keyword "living room storage furniture", we could also capture searches for related terms like "TV furniture", "coffee table", and "living room sofas".
Driving more traffic with brand keywords
We also experimented with using keywords related to other furniture brands and popular product categories, for example a brand name alongside the term “coffee table”. Initially, this approach performed less effectively than we expected in driving new traffic to our website. However, we realised that these keywords could be still valuable for engaging our ideal customers.
To further expand our reach, we needed to create visually appealing ads and engage people who browse for furniture. For this, we chose Demand Gen, which enables us to reach users who have shown interest in products similar to ours, thanks to custom segments feature.
We began by creating ad groups for our priority categories, such as Storage Furniture or Textiles. To ensure that these ads reached relevant customers, we set up custom segments based on keywords. For example, for a sofa category, we included keywords like "couch", "sofa bed", and "living room furniture". This allowed us to reach users who searched for these keywords on Google Search and expand our reach.
We then monitored the performance of each ad group and identified the top-performing creative assets within each category. To further improve results, we combined these high-performing creatives into a new ad group, featuring a mix of products across different categories.
Within this group, we broadened our keyword strategy to include terms associated with popular furniture brands and products, similar to our approach with broad match. This approach yielded impressive results.
We recorded a 20% higher return on investment (ROAS) compared to other ad groups and a 40% lower cost per click, enabling us to attract more users in a cost-effective way. This updated strategy proved effective in addressing the challenge of declining website traffic, leading to improved brand visibility and higher online sales. Notably, we showcased a wide range of our products to potential customers who were interested in these items but might have purchased from other brands without exposure to our ads.
Inspiring dream home designs
Enhancing creative assets was key to the success of our Demand Gen campaigns. Previously, we used static images to showcase our products. However, Demand Gen encouraged us to experiment with more interactive formats, such as videos, demonstrating how our furniture can fit into people’s homes. This not only showcased our products but also inspired users with design ideas for their dream homes.
Here’s an example of such a video ad:
Ultimately, the new strategy helped us reach potential customers who were searching for furniture, but may not have initially considered purchasing from us.
While we increased our ad budget throughout this revamp, our success wouldn't have been possible without the strategic shifts we implemented, such as creating new ad groups, custom segments, and new creative assets. Without these changes, we would have reached saturation, hindering our ability to expand our reach and explore new opportunities.
Our new strategy resulted in a 7X revenue jump. And, most excitingly, we reached our goal of increasing our website traffic, as we recorded 62% more site visitors year-over-year.
To further grow our customer base, we plan to introduce seasonal promotions to attract more price-sensitive consumers this year. Although Greece is recovering from a deep economic crisis, many people still seek deals and special offers. This strategy is particularly relevant in the Greek market, where economic conditions have led to a strong demand for discounts and special offers.
