Smart-Balance – from quantity to quality
Initially, this project was in the studio only for SEO optimisation. The advertising for it was handled by another contractor, but from the beginning of October we had the opportunity to try our hand at advertising too. The niche turned out to be quite interesting, especially as we had never before been involved in retail sales of electric scooters, segways and the like. We started work as early as 8 October 20.
First steps and first results
Initially the account was set up to automate processes and to maximise the amount of traffic and transactions rather than their actual value, this seemed like a strange idea and the decision was made to get rid of the old structure completely and “start from scratch”.
Our biggest fear was the Smart campaign, in which nothing could be controlled and which actually took up 70-90% of all account spending. It did carry purchases and other conversions in relatively large quantities, but their quality and value was questionable. And there were also days when it “went crazy” and spent far more than it was supposed to without any apparent benefit. In any case, this was not our solution and an overly “smart” campaign had to be got rid of.
Next, we decided to focus on merchandise and partly bring back search. To begin with, we divided the goods into several groups – expensive goods, cheap goods and electric scooters.
This was done not because we like electric scooters so much, but because they are the most expensive and in this way it was possible to train the campaign correctly on them only. We divided all the products roughly so that they were in their respective price segments and did not interfere with each other.
In addition, with this structure, we started to implement a cross-sell strategy. A customer who bought an electric scooter also received advertising for components and safety equipment for it, which encouraged them to make additional purchases.
A search campaign for electric scooters was also launched, which proved to be the most problematic afterwards.
Stage of training
We did not expect quick results, but we were already pleasantly surprised in the first few months – we were getting good figures, despite the fact that the seasonality of these products (spring-summer-early autumn) had already passed.
Around this stage, it was decided to abandon other conversions apart from Purchasing and focus entirely on orders from the website and their value, which increased the percentage of order conversions.
In the meantime, the search showed little or no results, and we continued to test different betting strategies.
We subsequently abandoned it.
Scaling stage
We approached scaling very slowly and carefully. We monitored the value per conversion rate, gradually increased our budgets and reduced the target return on advertising investment. We were able to reach the required volumes in terms of value for conversions by January-February of the twenty-first year.
We believe that the scaling up has been successful, as compared to the previous period:
- the value of conversions increased by 43.62% (total receipt of all orders);
- conversions by 31.51% (total purchases);
- value per value of conversions by 50.41% (total value of orders per value of attracting those orders);
- the cost of conversions (price per conversion) fell by 28.41%.
Summing up
The previous contractor focused on process optimisation, traffic to the site and overall conversions. We decided to do things differently and go with the value of transactions. To put it crudely: sell less, but more value.
We ended up with these figures:
- the average price per click has decreased by 13.91% (average attraction price per click);
- the number of conversions has decreased by 27.62% (but they have become more relevant);
- the cost of conversions fell by 14.30% (cost per conversion attracted);
- the value of conversions increased by 18.12% (total receipt of all orders);
- the value of conversions per value increased by 90.44% (and that’s not even seasonal).
We were able to attract more valuable sales at a lower price.
At the moment we are continuing our partnership with Smart-Balance and we are looking forward to the start of the season and the opportunity to improve our performance.
We hope this little case study has been useful to you, Thank you for listening!
