Performance Max for an online musical instrument store

The project was made by:

Tetiana Zhukivets, Project-manager at ITForce
Nelly Khlyapova, PPC specialist at ITForce

Service: Google Ads.
Project: lanota.com.ua — an online store of musical instruments with delivery in Ukraine.
Region: Ukraine.
Period of writing: November 2022–January 2023.
Promotion goal: increase in sales of goods.
Task from the customer: increase the demand for the company’s products.
Result: +353 transactions with Performance Max (29.31% of the total).

Google Ads is one of the fastest ways to reach target customers online. The contextual advertising takes into account the demand and requests of users. How exactly?

Paid advertising allows you to show ads to potential customers who are actively looking for the products or services you offer. This means that you show ads only to those users who are actually interested in your product. This allows you to achieve high conversions and use your advertising budget efficiently.

Today we are going to look at the case of the musical instrument store lanota.com.ua.

1. Client — an online musical instrument store

The client turned to ITForce with the task of setting up contextual advertising to increase demand for the company’s products.

The assortment of the client’s company:

• wind and keyboard instruments;
• acoustic systems;
• guitars and equipment;
• percussion instruments;
• studio and DJ equipment;
• Hi-Fi and Hi-End equipment.

Competitive advantages of the customer:

• a wide range of products for beginners and professionals in different price categories;
• all products are certified with a certificate from the official manufacturer;
• goods from the store have a guarantee for exchange, repair or return, subject to the rules of operation;
• the customer can order goods with payment upon receipt, which allows you to make sure the quality of the goods before paying for the order;
• when choosing a product, the customer can get a free consultation from the call center manager in an online chat.

The client’s website was created on the Horoshop platform, so to set up contextual advertising, a specialist needs access to the admin panel. The e-commerce block in Horoshop is already built into the website, so specialists can use the data feed for advertising purposes.

At the beginning of our cooperation, we created and set up Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts.

2. Setting up contextual advertising for an online musical instrument store

We have been working with the client since May 2022 and have already presented the results of our work in the case study. We set up campaigns in:

• search network;
• shopping campaigns (Shopping and later Smart shopping).

But. The fact is that Google Smart Shopping campaigns will cease to exist on September 16, 2022. Until then, advertisers had to convert these campaigns to Performance Max.

Setting up and operating Performance Max

In September, we started transferring Smart Shopping campaigns to a new format – PMax.

Features of Performance Max campaigns:

• marketing, geo-targeting, and advertising goals are set up;
• budget;
• text, images, videos for ads;
• product feed;
• Google Мій бізнес;
• Google Merchant Center;
• dynamic remarketing feed;
• business data feed;
• audience signals (optional);
• Google audiences (manually targeted).

The data is required to pass moderation and allow campaigns to be launched. Display locations for Performance Max campaigns:

• Google search — the top of the page;
• YouTube — before, during, or after watching a video on YouTube;
• Gmail — ads may appear in the inbox of a Gmail message;
• Google Discover Feed is a Google feature that allows users to receive personalized articles and news in the Discover panel on the home page of a mobile device or on the Google home page;
• Google Display Network — Google’s contextual media network.

Google’s suggestions for transition.
Instructions for setting up Performance Max campaigns.
ITForce recommendations for working with PMax.

Examples of ads customized for the customer’s website:

Let’s take a look at the performance of all advertising campaigns from September to November 2022:

The first thing we can see from the screenshot is that out of all the launched campaigns, Performance Max immediately became the leader in terms of the number of clicks and transactions made. But Shopping still brings significant results — this campaign ranks 2nd in the account by the number of transactions.

Performance Max has been working in the client’s account since 10.09.2022. As of November 1, 2022, we have the following data:

• Performance Max brought the majority of views (60.3% of sessions out of 100%);
• the transaction conversion rate in the general PMax campaign is higher than in other campaigns and higher than the average account rate (although in the branded PMax it is 0.33%);
• almost 60% of transactions were generated by 2 Performance Max campaigns.

Next, we focused our efforts on maximizing PMax efficiency.

3. Performance Max results November 2022 – January 2023

List of completed works since November 1, 2022:

• processing of Google recommendations;
• updating and optimizing high-cost keys without transactions;
• adding non-targeted queries to the list of negative keywords;
• adding audiences to the Observations;
• adding new titles and descriptions to adaptive search ads;
• improving the quality score of ads;
• reallocation of budgets in campaigns;
• excluding regions without transactions;
• change of bidding strategies for certain campaigns;
• setting up new campaigns for a specific product brand;
• set up and launch trade ads for the Casio brand;
• set up and run a Performance Max campaign for the Generator’s product category;
• verify and set up new tracking goals.

What data do traffic channels provide us with for 3 months:

Paid search (also known as contextual advertising) still dominates all traffic channels. It brings the vast majority of transactions — 86.49%.

It should be noted that music equipment is not a product of wide or everyday demand. The client’s product groups belong to a specialized niche. People don’t buy a new guitar, mixer, generator, etc. every day. That is, music products are goods of a balanced decision, not an impulsive purchase. And when setting up and launching a context, you need to take this into account.

For example, we have the following statistics on website visits from advertising:

Please note that:

• 110 716 sessions on the site were brought by advertising;
• 1,957 additions to the shopping cart;
• 970 completed transactions in total from paid traffic.

The client’s sales funnel is very wide: 110,716 times users looked at products on the website. Of these, 1,166 (1.77%) visitors went on to add a product to the cart, and 970 of them (0.88%) completed the order properly. We have an approximate ratio of 1 to 100.

That is, people are looking at products more often, studying the characteristics, comparing products and offers of websites with each other. And finally, they choose the best and most acceptable option for themselves. You need to be prepared for the fact that not every user who clicks on an ad will end up adding an item to the cart or making a transaction. In this case, the task of contextual advertising is to attract interested users – those who have an interest and intention to buy.

At that time, it may take some time before a customer buys a product: from 1 day to several weeks. To understand this information, let’s take a look at the Associated Conversions report (the report takes into account conversions from all traffic channels).

*Conversion is not only a purchase, but also adding an item to the cart, starting the checkout process, clicking on a phone number, etc.

From the screenshot, we can see that the time between the first viewing of a product page and its purchase can be 29 days. And most often, visitors return to the site within the first week after viewing the product. This is the delayed effect of contextual advertising.

Now let’s take a look at the performance of all paid advertising from November 1 to January 31.

Black Friday was at the end of November, and we saw an increase in ad views. And the campaigns we set up in January were especially effective — the screenshot shows a rapid increase in the number of ad clicks. At the same time, we had a predictable increase in advertising costs, and the CTR remained at about the same level.

*CTR (Click-through rate) — the ratio of the number of clicks on an ad to the number of its impressions. It is measured as a percentage. It is used to measure the effectiveness of online advertising.

It is worth noting that January is usually characterized by a decline in demand for goods, especially high-value goods (and music equipment is a high-value product). Instead, our client saw an increase in website traffic. This is partly explained by our findings above — the delayed purchase decision and associated conversions.

Now you can see the performance of each campaign separately:

• 87.69% of users were brought by advertising;
• 55.62% of transactions were generated by contextual advertising;
• 56.75% of revenue was generated by contextual advertising.

Now let’s look at the overall effectiveness of advertising in January/October (we did launch PMax in September, but in October the campaigns learned enough and we got quite acceptable data):

• 80.71% — increase in users;
• 62.35% — increase in sessions;
• 9.85% — increase in transactions;
• average order value increased by 24.64%;
• 98.24% decrease in the bounce rate on the website;
• 36.92% increase in revenue.

January is the month after the winter holidays (Christmas and New Year), which means that the purchasing power of the population is no longer high. Nevertheless, the ads worked well, and our client received both an increase in transactions and revenue. In return, we managed to reduce the bounce rate by 98% (i.e., the users attracted by the ads were more targeted).

If we take those Performance Max campaigns that ran in October 2022 and January 23 and compare their performance to see if they’ve become more effective, we’ll get this:

• +17.85% increase in the number of users who clicked on the ad;
• +49.26% to the average order check from 2 PMax campaigns;
• +41.15% increase in return on advertising spend;
• +40.90% growth in sales revenue;
• -5.6% decrease in the number of transactions.

Yes, indeed, we have slipped in terms of the number of orders placed from these 2 advertising campaigns: compared to October, the client received 5.6% fewer orders. Instead, we managed to increase the average check by 49.26%. Sales revenue also grew significantly: in January, the owner of the music store received +40.9% more revenue compared to October.

Regarding the return on advertising spend: for advertising to be effective and cover the costs of launching and attracting users, ROAS should be above 100%. In January, compared to October, we had a ROAS of 13,193%. This is much higher than 100%. This means that the PMax campaigns we set up are effective and fully recoup the client’s costs.

Now, let’s take a look at the results of all the configured Performance Max campaigns. As a reminder, as of January 2023, we had 3 PMax campaigns running:

1. a campaign based on Smart Shopping;
2. a campaign for the Harley Benton brand;
3. a campaign for the Generators product group (the campaign was launched on January 10.

The Performance Max group of campaigns brings to the client:

• 39.55% of visits to the website from advertising;
• 29.61% of all transactions, which is almost a third;
• 29.46% of revenue from all contextual advertising.

In general, we can say that the customized Performance Max campaigns have brought significant results – they generate a third of the client’s sales.

The advertising set up by the ITForce specialist meets the goal of the customer’s request – sales of products have increased. The revenue generated from the sale of music products and equipment fully recouped the costs of advertising and customer acquisition. We continue to work on optimizing and improving contextual advertising.