Summary
Samsung wanted its paid search campaigns to work harder to engage Irish consumers during the Black Friday sales period. Working with digital agency Core, the company adopted a high-volume Broad Match bidding approach, to reach more potential consumers. Natural budget wastage from this approach was minimised by trialling which strategies led to the most conversions and by including first-party behavioural data into the audience targeting.
In addition, the strategy was counter-balanced with return on ad spend (ROAS)-focused, dynamic shopping campaigns which showed Samsung ads to those consumers most likely to purchase. Ongoing monitoring ensured the campaigns were optimised against trending products. The campaign led to a 21% increase in purchases and a 25% increase in revenue, for 75% less cost.
Objectives & aims
Samsung’s Black Friday paid search budget for the Irish market was 55% lower than the previous year, but Core needed to deliver the same results.
The target audience was Irish customers shopping for gifts and personal electronics across three key categories – mobile, wearables and hearables.
Implementation, execution & tactic
Core knew from experience that Broad Match keywords considered more intent signals in the search query than any other match type. Therefore, the strategy was to adopt a broader targeting approach. This would display Samsung ads to any consumer who had used any variation of target keywords, in any order, in their search. The advantage of this approach was that it would result in more ads being shown to more potential consumers. However, its disadvantage was that ads could also be shown to users who had entered irrelevant variations of keywords into their search. This could potentially waste the already limited budget.
To counteract this, in the weeks leading up to Black Friday, bidding strategies were trialled to uncover those ones which led to the most cost-effective conversions, targeting consumers with the highest intent-to-purchase. These were then scaled up over the Black Friday period. In addition, Samsung’s first-party data from Irish customers and website visitors was layered into the target audience lists to provide additional bidding signals such as previous purchase and search history.
Alongside the high-volume strategy of the Broad Match approach, ROAS-focused dynamic shopping campaigns were used, to boost conversions more cost effectively. These AI-powered campaigns were linked to Samsung’s product feed and showed the right products to the right audience at the right time, based on user search history, across the Google search and display networks, YouTube and Gmail.
Ongoing monitoring of both types of campaign performance led to optimisations based around Black Friday trends. For example, analysis showed that Black Friday demand and sales were down year on year, particularly for high-value items such as smart TVs. This insight led to Samsung pivoting its bidding strategies towards lower-value products with high volumes. In addition, during the week leading up to Black Friday, there was an increase in search queries around smart watches. Samsung subsequently built out Broad Match campaigns to maximise the opportunity.
Results
- 280% increase in ROAS
- 21% increase in purchases
- 25% increase in revenue
- 73% decrease in cost per order (CPA) – the lowest cost per order (CPAs) ever registered for Samsung campaigns.
- 23% increase in conversion rate