As one of the country’s largest mattress retailers, US-Mattress wanted to gain greater insights into its sales to better serve its 250,000 customers. The company had already garnered new business using Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads (PLAs), so it turned to Shopping campaigns next. With Shopping campaigns, US-Mattress streamlined its PLA management, gained consumer insights, and pinpointed the mattress brands with the greatest growth opportunity. The results: click-throughs jumped 30% and the value of an average order increased by 10%.
Goals
Attain greater control and insight into sales
Attract more business
Approach
Upgraded its Product Listing Ad (PLA) campaigns to Shopping campaigns
Organized product groups by brand, sub-brand and items
Optimized bids with impression share and benchmark data
Results
Increased CTR 30%
Increased average order value 10%
Lowered CPA
Increased ROI and conversion rate
A quarter-million customers Online since 2001, US-Mattress is one of the country’s largest mattress retailers. It carries over 2,500 brand-name mattress sets and serves 250,000 customers across the United States. Seeking greater control and insights into sales, the company upgraded its Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) to Shopping campaigns.
Better campaign performance The retailer began using PLAs in January 2012 to attract more business. “They became more of a focus once traffic ramped up and delivered high conversion rates,” says Marketing Manager Wendy Yuan. “Having PLAs and text ads appear concurrently was mutually beneficial. PLAs are now an integral part of our online ad strategy.”
Shopping campaigns offer an intuitive way for retailers to manage PLAs and sell products on Google. US-Mattress can now manage a campaign much as it would manage its brick-and-mortar stores. Shopping campaigns let the company browse inventory and group products it wants to bid on, all in Google AdWords. Additionally, advanced reporting and optimization features help to measure performance and estimate growth opportunities.
More accurate measurements Regular PLA campaigns drove lots of traffic to US-Mattress for specific brands. PLAs provided a lower average cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA), plus high click-through and conversion rates. Shifting to Shopping campaigns in February 2013 brought more improvements.
“With Shopping campaigns, we can break everything down by brand and subbrand without overlapping items in our product groups,” Yuan explains. “This gives us more accurate performance metrics, and we save several hours per week on feed and campaign management. The time and effort we save can be used to optimize performance of the brand, sub-brand and product.”
Shopping campaign benchmark metrics give us a clearer picture of what will happen if we change our bidding strategy.
“Extremely simple” transition The shift to Shopping campaigns was extremely simple, Yuan adds. “The setup made it easy to transition and categorize all of our products. With product groups instead of product targets, it was easier to manage bids, which was one of our main reasons for switching over. We found opportunities to segment product groups even further, bidding by stock keeping unit (SKU).”
By subdividing its brands, for example, US-Mattress can see exactly which items have a large impression share. “Without Shopping campaigns, we would have never known what was driving conversions for different brands and what the bidding landscape looked like,” Yuan says.
Clearer picture of bidding landscape Shopping campaigns have delivered measurable results for US-Mattress. The click-through rate (CTR) climbed 30% while the average order value rose 10%. CPA dropped, while ROI and the conversion rate both improved.
“Shopping campaign benchmark metrics give us a clearer picture of what will happen if we change our bidding strategy,” Yuan says. “With new and additional performance metrics, we handle bidding strategy and campaign management with ease and confidence. We plan to expand on our Shopping campaigns even further.”
