Case on increasing sales on Instagram using Google Ads
Customer information: practicing stylist image-maker, instructor @woman_insight_kharkov.
Target audience (TA) characteristics and portrait: all women who strive to find themselves and create their own individual style. The TA core is women aged 18-54.
Geo: Kharkiv.
Interests: cosmetics, fashion, style, self-care, clothing and accessories.
Promotion period: October 1, 2019 – present (12.03.2020)
Idea:
Increase the number of customers looking for the services of an stylist image-maker outside of social networks. To solve the problem of ineffective targeted advertising due to inconstant consumer demand, in favor of contextual advertising — work with constant demand.
Task:
Set up contextual advertising in order to increase the number of customers.
Project limitations:
- The main landing page is the Instagram profile itself. In addition, you can more accurately direct the user on request to a specific post. However, maintaining an Instagram profile is very dynamic, and even more so in fashion topic. The fact that was relevant a month ago may no longer have its value today, which means that you would have to spend much more time optimizing an advertising campaign with different landing pages. In addition, we must not forget about users who do not come from contextual advertising: for them, all relevant information is stored in pinned stories.
- Instagram is more a mobile service than a desktop one. In this regard, the emphasis in promotion should be placed on a mobile device.
- There is no way to install Google Analytics on an Instagram profile to get detailed statistics.
- There is no way to accurately record conversions for ads and extensions. The main criterion of effectiveness is clicks, including clicks on the “Phone Number” Extension.
- Classic remarketing cannot be configured for this project.
- Limited use of extensions. For example, when using the “additional link” extension, we are again faced with the issue of landing pages (see above). However, such a tool is suitable for use in order to promote a new project.
- This topic and the main request “stylist” have a large number of irrelevant requests, since people are looking not only for a stylist for clothes, but also for makeup, hairstyles.
- Contextual advertising for Instagram profile promotion has limitations in choosing a rate strategy. For example, since we cannot record and collect statistics on the number of conversions and their cost, the “Maximum conversions” strategy automatically becomes ineffective.
- Narrow geo — the city of Kharkiv and low demand: for example, Google Trends does not provide annual statistics for the entire Ukraine due to insufficient data for the main request “stylist image-maker”. And according to the general request “stylist”, we see unstable dynamics in Kharkiv (do not forget that this is a very general request for the customer’s business):
According to Keyword Planner from Google Ads the average number of requests per month for the same keywords is quite low:
Project advantages:
A few years ago we entered the era of mobile marketing: people that want to be successful in this business need to remember this and, more importantly, meet the standards of a society living in smartphones.
Using an Instagram profile as a landing page for your business has a number of advantages:
- There is no need to develop a landing page and/or website, optimize and promote it in a search engine.
- No need to spend resources on developing a mobile version of the website (remember that Instagram is primarily a mobile application).
- Additional mobile URLs are not required.
- There is no need to create another mobile application that will cover the needs of your business.
To achieve this goal and maximize the results, first of all, we collected semantics and created a Google Ads account.
An advertising campaign was created with ad groups matching the key requests with one ad and dynamic header that meets the request.
Since the number of keywords for the services of a stylist image-maker is limited, accordingly, the following types of matching are selected for these keywords: wide – for key requests containing more than two words, a wide–matching modifier (for requests of less than 3 words), phrasal – for the most general requests, for example, “stylist”, “image-maker”, “stylist services”. The exact type of match is not used in order not to further narrow the traffic on request.
The following advertising campaign settings were selected:
Location: Kharkiv. At the moment, geo is being tested for large district centers of the Kharkiv region.
Networks: Google search engine and search partners.
Languages: Russian, Ukrainian, English – regional.
Rate: at the start of the project, the strategy “Fixing the CPC manually” was chosen, after a month and a half, the strategy was changed to “Target percentage of impressions received”. As a result, over the same test period, we received an increase in performance indicators with a decrease in the average CPC:
As for the Instagram account itself, it is important to provide potential customers with access to all the necessary information and ensure successful navigation on the page: create relevant stories, add contact information and buttons for communication.
Results:
- Clicks on the phone number in extensions – 569. For example, according to the latest data, 1 call was made in the Instagram account itself in the period from February 27 to March 4:
During the same period, the “Phone number” extension was clicked 40 times.
- Clicks on the “Promotion” extension for Black Friday – 90. This promotion led to a specific post with a promotional offer:
The post has received 370 views and 44 comments. That is, about a quarter of the views are the result of the campaign.
It will be possible to evaluate the merits of contextual advertising even higher if we consider that at the time of publication there were 15,816 followers in the account, that is, only 1 of 57 of the account’s audience watched the video, while 716 users saw the extension with the promotion, and every eighth watched it.
The question arises: is it worth increasing the number of followers if we get more results from advertising to an audience with already constant demand? It depends on what goal pursued.
- Clicks on Additional links – 97. This indicator confirms the words that even if a click on this extension leads the user to the same landing page – Instagram profile – it is still necessary to use this opportunity in order to demonstrate additional information about the customer’s services.
Moreover, additional links turned out to be the most effective extension of this advertising campaign:
- According to auction statistics, ads for our customer’s services received 60% of all impressions and are in first place among competitors.
- The number of applications in Direct has increased by 30%.
Conclusion:
Not only SMM activity is able to form the audience of an account on the Instagram social network: in the first three months after the launch of the advertising campaign, the increase in followers amounted to 64 people.
The use of contextual advertising contributes to an increase in the number of brand requests: in six months it has increased 10 times.
Most Instagram account followers are a passive audience of observers who do not need the services or products offered right now, especially if they are uniquely designed and static. Most likely, they are interested in the content and personality of the customer. If the user has already used such an offer once, there will be no repeated demand, because this is not a clothing store that they subscribe to in order not to miss the next fashionable novelty, which they will most likely want to buy.
The reverse situation with contextual advertising: the user is looking for specific information here and now, he is already thinking about the purchase, it is not so important for him to subscribe to an account in order to see the customer’s publications, but to get the desired result to achieve a certain goal.
Despite the inability to track conversions, evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign and optimize it according to other indicators, you can also always get feedback from the customer about changes in the number of applications, sales, etc.
The choice to use contextual advertising to increase sales from the Instagram profile depends on the goals and specifics of the customer’s business, but most importantly, you need to understand that this is a working and effective tool.
Expert in legal marketing. Head of marketing agency MAVR.
Business degree “Master of Business Administration” (MBA).