This chapter focuses on the case study of Viral Vibes, walking hand in hand with an ambitious e-commerce businesswoman, Helena from the USA, who aimed at dealing with the diminishing e-sales and boosting PPC advertising strategy. Learn the 5 Steps on How to Carry Out a Competitive Analysis and stay ahead of your competitors in the dynamic digital marketplace.
Working with the client, Viral Vibes focused on specific goals. They reached another milestone within two months of the project launch – broken down to Helena's store sale results, 350%, or 4x ROAS during the 90 days of cooperation.
Executive Summary
Helena owns a USA-based e-commerce store in fashion and accessories, which is why she came to Viral Vibes when her business reached a critical moment. Although selling differentiated products within their strategic market niche, Helena suffered from invisibility in cyberspace, fluctuating sales, and ineffective marketing intervention.
Her particular store was able to make around $8,000 a month in gross sales. Still, she couldn't grow her Amazon affiliate business any more because of saturated traffic and a relatively high CPA. Helena looked for an opportunity that would increase her sales without having to spend a lot of money.
To this effect, Viral Vibes created and implemented a customized PPC campaign that catered for Helena's business needs. Owing to extensive research on her target populace and the use of analytical data, Viral Vibes realized incredibly outstanding revenues within three months.
Key outcomes included:
Sales Growth: Sales have gone up by a quarter, thus raising Helena's monthly revenue from 9000 to 20,000.
Higher ROAS: The Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) soared from 1.8 to 4.2 to guarantee that Helena gained $4.20 in returns for every dollar invested in advertising.
Cost Efficiency: The overall Cost per Acquisition (CPA) decreased to 25% which meant that the cost per customer acquisition or sale decreased from 40$ to 30$.
Traffic Surge: There was website traffic: Website traffic increased by 60%, more than 10,000 unique visitors per month in comparison with 6 250 unique visitors per month before the campaign.
Improved Conversion Rate: Unstacking raised her conversion rates from 2.5% to 3.8% Using targeted ads and better designing the landing page of her site.
Client Background
As a digital marketing agency, Viral Vibes worked together with Helena; an e-commerce store proprietor from the United States of America who required top-notch strategies to help her online store generate the desired traffic and sales.
The store owned by Helena targets extra-value, meaningful products for everyday living: accessories, home accessories, innovative gadgets and more. Though she had a neat product list with affordable prices for the range of products she was selling, she encountered problems while developing her business's permanent sales on the Internet.
When Helena contacted Viral Vibes, her store was making $8,000 in monthly sales through word of mouth and sometimes occasional share on social media pages. However, the competitive aspect of her niche required her to establish something more daring and methodical regarding paid promotion.
Helena's goal was clear: to generate at least a 50% increase in her monthly earnings within a space of three months, in addition to acquiring the desired ROAS of 400%.
Helena realized she had $5,000 per month to spend on advertisements, and she is knowledgeable about every cent being spent. She also sought to capture a wider Latina in the target market within the United States Market to target specific high-converting demography of buyers, including the millennials and Generation Z.
Cognizant of these issues and possibilities, Helena decided to collaborate with Viral Vibes in creating a research backed, highly effective PPC campaign to fit Helena's store.Challenges and Objectives
Helena, the owner of a mid-sized e-commerce store based in the USA, contacted Viral Vibes, and here are the challenges she was facing that affected her business.
As much as she had a wide portfolio of products, an easy-to-navigate website and appealing branding and packaging, her store was experiencing a sales growth of about $9000 per month, which was way below her expectation of $35 000 per month. She found herself receiving little traffic to her site, a low order conversion rate, and increased competition in the niche in which she operated.
Challenges
Low Website Traffic: Website analysis of Helena's revealed that the company was receiving only 2,500 visitors per month, of which only 0.8% were making purchases; the figures were way below the industry standards, which Hover stated to be 2-3 % for e--e-commerce sites.
Inefficient Ad Spend: Although Helena used PPC campaigns in the past, her efforts were not reaping big results for her business. She revealed that the CPA was almost $35, and with that, it proved impossible to scale up her adverts.
High Cart Abandonment Rates: From her visitors, she ascertained that 61% left their carts before checking out entirely, suggesting some problems with the buying experience for customers.
Lack of Brand Visibility: One major working challenge that Helena could identify was the problem of market positioning, competing with more established brands available on the market.
Strategy and Implementation
For Helena, overcoming the challenges and indeed gaining her goals, a strong and analytical Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign strategy was developed for her. It was subdivided into several phases in order to obtain increased accuracy at each phase and to achieve flexibility.
Campaign Planning
The first activity was an analysis of Helena's target consumers and their buying patterns. The team, armed with Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush, sifted through over 200 high-intent keywords associated with her product categories. These keywords were then segmented into three tiers based on competition and potential ROI:
Tier 1: Large traffic words with the possible conversion rates.
Tier 2: Low-competition, high-targeted keywords for saving more money.
Tier 3: Strict match for addressing the audiences that haven't been targeted before.
$500 per month was spent on high-competition keywords, $300 for medium-competition keywords and only $200 for experimenting with long-tail keywords.
Ad Creation
The ads creatives developed were to relate well with Helena's targeted audience. More than 50 ad variations were created; this way, it was possible to A/B testing to achieve maximum results. Key features of these ads included:
Eye-catching Headlines: Use such words as "Limited time offer" and "Free shipping".
Compelling Descriptions: Focusing on such product attributes as environmentally friendly and cheap.
Strong CTAs: This is how banner phrases like "Shop Now," or "Don't Miss Out" created a sense of urgency.
Platform Selection
The main ad platform in the PPC campaign was Google Ads, and Meta Ads (formerly Facebook Ads because of their versatility.
Google Ads: Biddable web display generated targeted search ads for high-intent shoppers and took up the largest share of the budget at 60%.
Meta Ads: The final 40% was retargeted through dynamic product ads, which came across like this:
Bid Management
A hybrid bidding strategy was employed:
Manual CPC (Cost-Per-Click): When launching the first ad, the primary important factors to be considered include control over the amount spent on the ad.
Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Where performance data was gathered, an automated bidding strategy was applied to adjust campaigns for the desired target ROAS of 4:1.
Landing Page Optimization
The PPC ads led the traffic to specific landing pages, which were designed for conversion. Key improvements included:
Page Speed: Cut loading time from 4 seconds down to 1.8 seconds and increase bounce rates by 25%.
Call-to-Action Placement: The addition of links with ''Buy Now'' tempted users and this improved the click-through rates CTR by 15%.
Product Recommendations: Widgets implemented using AI recommended related products, which improved AOV by 20%.
This multi-prong approach allowed Helena to reduce the costs of PPC campaigns and also optimize the campaign for conversion. Every element in the process was recorded so that changes could be made while still in the process, leading to the best value for the money spent.
Execution
Once Helena understood the basics of the PPC campaign, the analytical phase of the campaign planning was done accurately. In contrast, as soon as the campaign planning was done perfectly, the execution phase was started well planned so as to get the best results.
Campaign Launch
The PPC campaign was initiated on the 1st of April, 2023. This strategy was used to mitigate the risk of implementation failure and to gather useful, formal information to make decisions.
During the first two weeks, a test budget of $2500 was allocated across multiple ad groups targeting Helena's key product categories: Readers interested in perusing women's apparel and accessories.
Each ad group targeted specific demographics:
Women aged 25-45 in the USA.
Topics involved fashion, online buying, and eco-friendly fashion.
The team relied on Google Ads and Facebook Ads since those two platforms offer broad coverage for the audience and efficient built-in analytics.
Monitoring Initial Performance
Daily monitoring began immediately after the launch, focusing on:
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Made an average of 4.5 per cent in the 1st week.
Cost Per Click (CPC): Initial price $1.20 and then cut the price down to $0.90 after two weeks.
Conversion Rate: The first conversion rate obtained was 2.1%. It has more than a hundred sales, 105 from the 5,000 clicks registered.
Adjustments and Optimization
After analyzing initial performance, several adjustments were made to improve efficiency and outcomes:
Keyword Refinement: Optimized 15 keywords, which used to generate a high CPC but had a low CTR for the business. Coupled with long-tail keywords, the relevance of ads has been raised by 25 per cent.
Ad Copy Tweaks: Say added pressure by using phrases such as "Limited Stock" Order Now").
Result: In the third week, CTR increased to 5.3%.
Bid Management: Spread the 30 per cent of the budget to the ad groups that performed better than the others. They also adjust bids on usage of the device and time of the day.
A/B Testing: Tests were done between two landing page designs in order to get the results.
For the same period, the revised Version B, which teemed with refined navigation and clearer product imagery, increased conversion rates by 3.4%.
Scaling the Campaign
In the fifth week, the campaign experienced the lowest fluctuation in the performance metrics. Since the campaign started gaining ground, Helena approved increasing its monthly budget to $20000. With this scale-up:
Total impressions increased by 45%, and statistics showed that they reached 2.5 million.
Unique visitors or the number of visitors doubled as it rose to 80000 from the previous 50000 before the campaign.
Results
Starting with Helena's PPC campaign, the e-commerce store was successfully evaluated in 90 days; monthly sales went up from $9,000 to $ 20,000, and order numbers also grew by 120%. This led to an increase in website traffic by 150% to 20,000 visitors and an increase in conversion rate from 2.5% to 4.4%.
Overall CPA was brought down from $25 CPA to $15 CPA with 5.2 ROAS, improved ad interaction, and a bounce rate of 32%. The subsequent results show that the campaign was effective and generated a large growth and profitability of the company.
Wrap Up
This case study on PPC campaign success highlights how a strategic and data-driven approach can transform e-commerce performance, driving significant growth in sales, reducing costs, and achieving outstanding results for businesses like Helena's store.
Stay ahead in the ever-evolving marketing landscape by exploring the Trends in Digital Marketing for 2024 and discover strategies to keep your brand relevant.