Panem Digital Agency

The Client. A company offering an online email signature generator that helps create professional and branded email signatures for Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and Office 365 clients.

The Niche. Creating online email signatures for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders.

Our Task. Set up and launch effective online advertising targeted at SMB representatives and test several strategies using a limited budget.

The Goals. Identify the most efficient type of campaign that could secure a steady flow of orders and leads.

The Problems. Intense competition for ad impressions and on the market in general, high cost-per-click, limited advertising budget, and the need to identify relevant audiences.

Project Period. May 2022 — now.

CASE DESCRIPTION

In highly competitive industries, company marketers can easily spend a lot of time and money trying to generate qualified leads from Google Ads.

This case demonstrates how IT companies can get relevant leads using Google Ads at a lower price by targeting specific audiences and taking into account competitors when setting up advertising campaigns.

We got a limited budget from the client for the first month of the project, so we decided to focus on campaigns and targeting a specific audience.

1. DISPLAY ADS

This is advertising on Google partner sites. We targeted ads at interested audiences, interested customers, competitors' audiences, and specific audiences using keywords.

We received 18 conversions with an average cost-per-conversion of $21.23.

Then we analyzed which ad groups had been the most effective and extended their audiences. Additionally, we stopped ad groups that drove the least conversions.

2. CAMPAIGNS BASED ON COMPETITOR WEBSITES

At the start of the project, we performed an in-depth analysis of competitor sites and the value of their offers. We also analyzed their advertising, semantics, and ad copies.

We selected competitor sites closest to our client's product typology and created a separate Search campaign for them. We categorized ads into different ad groups based on the brand queries of competitor sites.

We received 24 conversions (Sign up) with the average cost per conversion of $14.34.

We analyzed the effectiveness of all groups we created based on competitors and stopped the ones that generated a large amount of traffic to the site but did not bring any conversions.

We also analyzed the device type and demographics data (age, gender) to adjust bids within active campaigns.

Since we managed to achieve remarkable results after the first month of advertising with a limited budget, a larger budget was allocated for the next month, which allowed us to expand the audience reach of active campaigns as well as to plan the launch of additional directions.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

In many areas of IT, the competition and CPCs in Google Ads are very high. The cost of a single click can reach tens of dollars. Before launching any advertising activities, it is worth examining the market in advance and analyzing your competitors’ advertising efforts. It’s possible to launch ad campaigns even with a relatively low advertising budget; the main thing is to carefully select the campaign type and audiences to target.

NewoldStamp - a SaaS marketing tool for creating and managing corporate email signatures and using them as a new marketing channel with minimum effort.  Their product helps professionals and organizations to include more features in their business email signature to be able to promote their content, brand their business or generate more leads. The challenge was to get first positions and grow up in the niche with well-known and established competitors with good positions and history.

SEO GOALS:

The goal of SEO is to collect more traffic from SERP and convert them into leads. The main requirement for contextual SEO is maximum natural and relevant content without hard keyword stuffing.

•  Raise the amount of targeting keywords and attract more traffic to the website.

• Develop and extend the blog with expert content and transfer clients from blog to product pages.

KPIS:

• Increase in organic traffic
• Growth of relevant keywords
• Tracking Seo metrics
• Gradual increase in the backlink mass of the site
• Top positions for main keywords in Google’s SERP

CHALLENGES:

• High competition for targeting keywords.
• Some competitors provide free solutions.
• The website didn’t meet technical optimization requirements.
• Poor SEO optimization of the services pages.
• Weak backlink profile.

OUR SOLUTIONS

STAGE 1

• Technical SEO improvements of the website

As a result of the technical audit, a number of problems were identified and recommendations for their elimination were provided.

• Competitors and niche analysis for a better understanding of the future SEO strategy.

• Keywords research and clustering of semantic core.
• Relevance map (keywords mapping to landing pages)

STAGE 2

• Create content plan for blog

• Optimize services pages

• On-page optimization 

STAGE 3

• Usability analysis and recommendation

• Planned linkbuilding strategy and implementation

• Searching for new grow-up points

In general it was big work with the marketing team, and it got a good result in long cooperation. Some tasks were performed on a regular basis, for instance:  track and update on competitors’ activities, backlinks check, creating strong and relevant content, building and testing search hypotheses. 

Difficult side:

A lot of Google updates. Change of keyword intent by search engines forced us to re optimize the landing pages. Most competitors offer free solution for email signatures and this fact matters when it comes to CTR. Despite all circumstances we found the right SEO solution for our client and got top positions for target keywords in SERP.

CONCLUSION:

Current situation is the following: the website is getting near 100k visitors from organic traffic monthly and successfully converts them into leads. We went a long way from zero to a big recognizable brand with impressions of more than 3,000,000 per month in the US and Europe. Our team coped with some competitors, a lot of Google’s updates, and various difficult challenges. It is a successful story about how a startup transformed into a big brand. Nowadays we continue to support the project.

Google Ads for Women’s Alcohol Treatment Center in California, USA
The Client: addiction treatment center for women located on the picturesque hills near Asheville, North Carolina.

The Niche: female-specific addiction treatment.

Our Task: set up and launch advertising targeted at women aged 35 to 65, belonging to the upper class and having a high financial status; select optimal types of advertising campaigns and audiences; test the ads for possible blocking by the Google moderation system.

The Goals: launch the project without getting banned; increase the number of clients turning to the clinic for “treatment of alcoholism in women" and “treatment of addictions in women"; ensure high quality of ad copies.

Problems: a rather specific type of service, advertising for which is often accompanied by blocking as well as partially or completely limiting the display of advertising.

Project Period: May 2022 — now.

Virtually all contextual advertising specialists who have worked on the promotion of medical services with Google Ads know that even permitted promotion directions can cause "unhealthy" interest of moderators and checking bots, which leads to constant rejections of ads or limiting the display of advertisements.

As of May 2018, ads for addiction services are officially banned within Google Ads in all countries except the United States. Advertisers from the US have to obtain LegitScript certification and be additionally certified by Google.

Theoretically, advertising delivery for queries like "how to stop drinking" should have stopped in 2018, but in 2022, when we type this query in the search box, we can see advertisements. It means that there is an opportunity to undergo moderation and find a way to launch ads that comply with the Google rules.

CASE DESCRIPTION

The first and foremost question to tackle was how to launch advertising for a service prohibited by Google from advertising. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. However, we can share approaches that we have already tested.

STEPS TO LAUNCHING ADVERTISEMENTS

1. WE EXAMINED ALL THE WAYS IN WHICH THE MODERATION SYSTEM CHECKS ADVERTISING AND WHAT CAN GET US BLOCKED.

In order for the system to reject an ad or block an account for violating the rules, it must understand that the rules have been violated. There are three elements that must be checked by moderation bots:

• keywords
• ad copy
• web page content

And while the first two points entirely belong to the advertising account, the client has to work on the web page content, and since the moderation bot scans not only the target page, but also the entire website, it will find "forbidden" words all over the website.

Together with the client, we decided to add a separate landing page on the website, created by programmers and designers according to the requirements, and direct traffic from ads to this page. We placed a greater emphasis on the benefits of the rehab center, accommodation, therapy, and relaxation.

1. THE LANDING PAGE

Creating a landing page for advertising is a key rule of keeping things balanced. If you add a lot of relevant content, moderation will reject you for advertising a prohibited service. If you add too little content, you’ll get the same result, but with an explanation "not enough original content". Nevertheless, we managed to keep the balance by adding the following to the pre-landing page:

• messenger widgets — for those who are ready to get in touch;
• a call button to a 24/7 call line;
• a link to the main site — for those who need additional information before making a decision;
• a button to the quote page;
• Google Analytics tracking codes.

1. SEARCH ADS

3.1. GATHERING SEMANTICS

Gathering semantics was different from our standard practice. While for most projects our task number one is to pick the most relevant keywords and remove inefficient ones at the prototype stage of an advertising campaign, we needed to change our approach in the case of addiction treatment. We could remove irrelevant keywords only in active campaigns. The main reason is that if you add keywords that are related to prohibited topics in an exact match, there is a 99% probability that the account will be blocked.

Launching advertising for specific services is possible, and it is also an interesting challenge and experience.

• take advantage of micro-conversions from the landing page if optimizing for macro-conversions from the main website is problematic;
• a low-quality indicator in the account, due to which traffic is more expensive than the average;
• it is necessary to have a backup account with unique ads, in case the main one is blocked;

Niche: IT 

Location: USA
Project Period: 01 July 2021 — now

About the Company: 

Geniusee is a software and product development company. Founded in 2017 in Kyiv, the company has over 200 qualified professionals who have completed more than a hundred well-known FinTech, EdTech, Retail, and other projects. Geniusee is an AWS consulting partner. 

OUR TASKS:

• Growing organic traffic to the website
• Increasing relevant queries
• Link building
• Improving ranking positions
• Increasing the number of leads from Google organic search

ISSUES WE FACED AT THE START:

• Low technical optimization of the website, numerous technical errors, and low loading speed. The website hadn’t been optimized technically before, so we encountered a range of serious problems hindering SEO.
• Intense competition. The client specializes in Fintech and Edtech, marked by strong competition for commercial and informational queries.
• Absence of a hierarchical website structure and non-optimized landing pages.

SCOPE OF WORK:

• We performed a technical audit of the client’s website and provided a range of recommendations for correcting technical errors.
• Keyword research and clustering.
• Competitor analysis: their metrics, strengths and weaknesses. 
• A proposal to expand the structure of the commercial pages based on the keywords and competitor analysis, and optimize them (this is still in process). We suggested adding pages for sub-services and sub-industries, targeting narrow, clearly commercial keywords.
• Together with the company’s content editor, we conducted in-depth research into the target audience and designed a content strategy and a content plan. The content plan was developed based on the client’s expertise and case studies. In addition, we suggested creating pillar pages based on the main industries to cover high-volume keywords (this task is currently being performed by the client). 
• Recommendations about writing new articles. We created technical tasks for each article that outlined the structure, content, keywords, links, visuals, and word count.
• Recommendations about optimizing existing articles (at the beginning of our cooperation, the client already had a blog; however, most of the articles didn’t bring any traffic at all). We analyzed the blog and, based on the analysis, categorized the articles into groups: those that needed optimization; several articles with the same search intent that could be combined into one; zero-performance articles featuring topics without any potential. We worked with each category separately to boost the performance of the articles.
• Recommendations about internal linking: we modified the header and the footer, added blocks for linking between different types of pages, linking from the blog to commercial pages, and linking between the articles.
• Recommendations for growing brand awareness: polishing authors’ profiles and publishing content on external authority sites.
• Developing a link-building strategy and accumulating external links to commercial pages and articles.

RESULTS OF WORK:

INCREASING ORGANIC TRAFFIC

Firstly, you need to understand your potential customer, elaborate on the ICP, and clearly understand how the customer can find you on Google. It’s essential to generate traffic from commercial keywords.

Portfolio, industries, and frameworks — conversion rates from these keywords are much higher than from broad queries such as “software development.”

Only systematic work on SEO can generate good results. This was close collaboration between our team and people from Geniusee that helped the project succeed.

Working on the content is only a part of the global strategy. Achieving good results without the proper approach to content and link building is difficult. That is why working collaboratively brings the best results.

A good SEO article is an effective tool for generating traffic. If you write it according to all the rules, collaborate with SEO specialists, and work on distribution, content marketing can become one of your primary lead generation channels.

HOW WE MANAGED TO REDUCE COST PER LEAD BY 30% FOR PIZZA DELIVERY IN TWO MONTHS OF THE WAR

The client: in November 2021, a new client contacted us. The client was about to launch a new pizza delivery service in Ivano-Frankivsk. They needed assistance with setting up an advertising campaign that would help the audience get aware of the new brand, get interested in it, as well as drive orders and new customers.

The Niche: pizza delivery service.

Our Task: get into the food delivery market, declare a brand, and enter the competition for customers.

The Goals: set up effective contextual advertising, embrace all possible advertising platforms, attract target audiences, ensure a successful start for the business, and maintain its growth.

Problems To Solve: pizza delivery is an intensely competitive niche. There are many well-established companies with high trust ratings, making it challenging for new, unknown businesses to enter the market and stay there. 

1. ADVERTISING BEFORE THE WAR

1.1. MARKET ANALYSIS

We started with analyzing active competitors on the market and evaluating their effectiveness, advertising, offers, and promotions. This is important to make sure we are one step ahead — knowing what competitors offer and what they do to attract the attention of potential customers, we have the opportunity to come up with our unique offer, which is no less valuable but even more attractive.

1.2. PLANNING ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS

We decided to set up the following campaigns:

• search campaign targeted at the city of Ivano-Frankivsk
• brand advertising (to stimulate the interest in the previously launched radio ads about the new pizza delivery service)
• display ads aimed at branding, brand awareness, and generating trust and interest of the audience.

1.3. LAUNCHING CAMPAIGNS

On the client’s approving the advertising budget, we chose the initial bid strategies (Maximize Clicks for the main campaigns, Manual CPC Bidding for branding campaigns). We launched campaigns and watched as they progressed. 

1.4. OPTIMIZATION

Starting from the second month of the project, we focused on search advertising, grouping campaigns according to the frequency of queries. Once in two weeks, we changed creatives with new offers and promotions in display ads. Additionally, we set up video ads to reach out to new audiences on YouTube.

2. WARTIME ADVERTISING

When the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine started, all advertising activities were immediately stopped. At that time, it was unknown when and how business activities would resume and whether they would be relevant.

After a month of the war, when many people from the central and southeastern regions of the country fled to the west of Ukraine, it became clear that the business had to work to support the country’s economy. Ivano-Frankivsk was one of those cities that actively welcomed guests.

Our client decided to try to resume the work and launch a test campaign to check the loyalty and readiness of the audiences.

2.1 MARKET CHANGES ANALYSIS

We conducted market research, looking into how restaurants and food delivery services were resuming their advertising activities. We noticed an interesting trend: if earlier 75% of queries in Ivano-Frankivsk were exclusively in Ukrainian, since the beginning of the war, the ratio between queries in Ukrainian and Russian had changed to 60/40.

2.2. RE-LAUNCH OF ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS

We planned the following types of advertising:

• search advertising in Ukrainian
• search advertising in Russian
• brand advertising
• display advertising
• video ads
• discovery ads
• local advertising suggesting customer pick-up

We gathered Ukrainian and Russian queries, categorized them into separate groups, and created ad copies featuring those queries.

In display and video advertising campaigns, we segmented audiences according to their interests and keywords, Ukrainian and Russian separately, placing the accent on the support of Ukraine and trust in the Ukrainian military. 

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Businesses shouldn’t stop working even during wartime. Before planning any advertising activities, it is worth analyzing the market, market trends, and public sentiment. Also, it is worth considering all additional factors and the competitors’ unique selling propositions. In the case of advertising a pizza delivery service, we benefited a lot from taking into account the language factor and the patriotic sentiment of the population.

We analyzed the demographic charts, which allowed us to create a new, more precise buyer persona and use it at the next stage of optimization. 

The Client: 

Avenga is an IT consulting company with extensive expertise in pharmacy, insurance, fintech, automotive, and real estate. Avenga Ukraine is a team of over 1200 qualified specialists who work in nine offices in Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Vinnytsia, Cherkasy, Khmelnytskyi, Lutsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Poltava.

THE TASKS:

• To transfer the website to a new domain

• To perform a technical audit of the website

• To improve the website’s domain rating

• To increase organic traffic

• To grow quality links

TAKING INTO ACCOUNT ALL THE PECULIARITIES OF THE WEBSITE, WE DECIDED TO DIVIDE OUR PROJECT INTO THE FOLLOWING STAGES:

STAGE 1

• CREATING A REDIRECT MAP FOR A PROPER SITE MIGRATION

It was essential to preserve website’s ranking positions and traffic accumulated over the last years. Because of some technical aspects and migration to a new platform, it was impossible to keep former URLs, so we designed a technical task for implementing the shortest possible URLs within the new website.

• TECHNICAL AUDIT

We conducted a technical audit to ensure that the new version of the website would be optimized to the greatest possible extent. In addition, the technical audit allowed us to take into account all technical aspects as well as new Google’s requirements and guidelines when creating the new website.

• TECHNICAL TASKS FOR OPTIMIZING EXISTING CONTENT

Our client's industry is constantly developing, so it's important to update content to ensure it's relevant. Our task was to understand what our client's potential customers were looking for and what problems they sought to solve. Using this information, we designed technical tasks for optimizing the existing content and writing new pieces.

STAGE 2

• BLOG AUDIT (UPDATING, COMBINING, REMOVING ARTICLES)

For Google, the ratio of performing and non-performing pages is very important. If most pages don't perform well, Google will reduce the positions and traffic of the performing pages. Given that, at this stage, we made decisions about each article, whether to update it, combine it with another one, or delete it. As a result, we managed to grow the number of well-performing pages.

• INTERNAL LINKING

For better indexing, when we clearly understood prioritizing of pages we promoted, we developed an internal linking structure.

• IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS OF LEAD-GENERATION ARTICLES

We also performed an SEO analysis of lead-generation articles, which helped us understand and provide recommendations on the content structure and visual blocks.

STAGE 3

LINK BUILDING

• identifying direct competitors and performing detailed analysis of link profile;

• designing the link building strategy (determining queries and pages for promotion, types and number of links, anchors);

• selecting donor sites (using specified parameters: primary traffic from the US, over 10,000 organic traffic from the US, DR>40, relevant niches, according to Majestic)

Speaking of link building, we always focus on quality, not on quantity. We gathered relevant, quality resources to create a link building strategy to follow in the next several years. We reviewed it once a quarter to check if it needed changes. Also, we added new links and grew links to the pages we were promoting. Relevant and high-quality donors allowed us to achieve higher DR and ranking positions as well as increase leads.

THE RESULTS:

DR: 59

REFERRING DOMAIN: 1,86K 

Combining practical knowledge of promoting websites on search engines with expertise, analytics, technical optimization, and close cooperation with the client, it’s always possible to achieve better results than initially planned. Search engine algorithms and requirements are getting stricter every year. That is why, to reach pre-determined KPIs, you have to become more inventive and resourceful every day. 

This case is an excellent example of the collaborative work of the Panem SEO agency and the client's marketing team.

A global ticket reseller for different sports events and cups. The big site had more than 40,000 pages without any optimization. It is a new project on the market without any brand and keyword vision.

SEO GOAL & OBJECTIVES:

SEO GOAL:

Increase sales of the offered tickets and collect more organic traffic.

• Increase the amount of targeted keywords and attract more traffic to the website.
• Check the backlink profile.

KPIS:

• Organic traffic volume
• Growth of relevant keywords
• Gradual increase in the backlink mass of the site
• Top positions for main keywords in Google’s SERP

CHALLENGES:

• High competition for targeted keywords.
• A new site without any vision in SERP.
• A problem with indexing
• The website didn’t meet technical optimization requirements
• Poor SEO optimization of all pages.
• A weak and spammy backlink profile.

SERVICES PROVIDED

FIRST STAGE

• Competitors and niche analysis.
• Technical audit of the website with further implementation.
• Checking the backlink profile.
• Keywords research and semantic core clustering.
• Relevance map for services and money pages.

SECOND STAGE

• On-page optimization of the main service pages.
• Finding solutions for indexing pages.
• Link building strategy and profound anchor list.
• Analysis of the existing backlink profile and disavowing of spammy links.

THIRD STAGE

• Distribution keywords for promoting pages.
• Create technical tasks for texts.
• Publishing texts.
• Continuing to work with the backlink profile.
• Updating money pages.

MAINTAINING IN-PROGRESS WORKS

• Backlink acquisitions.
• Extending of the semantic kernel for informational queries.
• Building and promoting expert content for the blog.
• Continuous iteration and improvement of the main landing pages.
• Analysis of backlink profile.
• Updating and improvement of the “evergreen” content on the website.
• Technical audit of the website.

OUR SOLUTIONS – BACKLINKS STRATEGY

After a comprehensive analysis of competitors’ backlink profiles we created a safe and result-oriented backlink strategy that aims to strengthen domain authority and drive traffic.

The focus was on quality backlinks coming from trusted and authoritative websites. For this purpose we use guest posting. We search and outreach potential donors which apply to certain criteria.

SUMMARY

In half a year, a lot of work was done and the desired results were obtained. As a result, all important pages were indexed and entered the Google cache. Organic traffic on Ahrefs increased from 30,000 to 244,000. The site received 1.3 million clicks and over 60,000,000 views for relevant keywords, as shown in the Google Search Console screenshot. All this led to the growth of lead generation on the client's website. Now we continue to work on further optimization of the site to obtain even better results.

Like many other industries, real estate has partially shifted to online mode. However, with so many real estate companies and agents, it's hard to get noticed by your potential customers without spending a fortune on PPC. Still, this is pretty achievable, thanks to SEO for real estate agent businesses. Go on reading to find out how our team managed to produce spectacular results in promoting a real estate agent platform through SEO.

ABOUT THE CLIENT

The Listing of Real Estate Agents is a platform for finding real estate agents in the US. It includes the most complete and comprehensive information about real estate agents, so you can compare and hire the right agent. The site offers agents' detailed profiles, sales history, reviews, and other information necessary for making more-informed hiring decisions. FastExpert allows you to view all agents in the database without registration.

SEO GOALS:

• Driving the maximum amount of relevant organic traffic to the site.
• Generating more leads.
• Growing trust in the website

SEO KPIS

• Increasing the number of site pages indexed by Google.
• Growing the number of keywords that can generate leads.
• The output of keywords in the top 3 and top 10.
• Increasing the number of backlinks with the help of link building.
• Improving the Domain Rating.

CHALLENGES:

• The real estate industry is a highly competitive niche.
• Listing real estate agents involves a large number of pages. All these pages cannot get into Google's SERP at once - indexing takes a long time.
• Technical errors on the site.
• Content issues (poor content quality compared to competitors).

EFFECTIVE SEO FOR REAL ESTATE: OUR SOLUTIONS

KEYWORDS & RELEVANT CONTENT FOR ROBUST REAL ESTATE SEO

We studied the entire pool of keywords in detail and divided them into clusters according to user intent. This allowed us to improve the structure of the site. In this way, we managed to avoid cannibalizing semantics to blur relevance. Focusing on low-frequency requests made it possible to move some service pages to the top.

FIXING TECHNICAL ISSUES

A series of technical SEO audits helped us reveal obstacles that slowed down the speed of page indexing, preventing Google bots from reading the content on the pages. Fixing these problems went a long way toward accelerating page indexing, increasing the number of clicks and impressions, and, ultimately, the value of the organic search traffic.

INTERNAL LINKING

We have created an internal linking strategy that helps the Google bot to parse the site more efficiently. This also had a significant impact on the indexing of the site.

SEO FOR REALTORS: LINK BUILDING TO BOOST ONLINE PRESENCE

We also identified that our client's major SERP competitors have more referring domains than the client's site. That's why we actively worked on increasing the website's backlink profiles, paying particular attention to the quality of donor websites. We selected relevant resources with good traffic indicators and high domain authority. This made it possible to increase the domain rating with a relatively low link-building budget.

FINAL THOUGHTS

SEO for real estate requires a strategic multi-method approach since the real estate market is one of the most intensely competitive niches. Given that, it's pretty challenging for real estate websites to get high search engine rankings organically. However, it's entirely possible as well.

It's essential to keep in mind that a successful search engine optimization strategy doesn't boil down to focusing on competitive terms and crafting original content. Besides channeling all your SEO efforts into a copywriting project, it's crucial to invest in a link-building campaign and fix technical issues such as slow page speed or missing alt tags.

HOW WE GOT A 1000% ROMI WITH SMART SHOPPING OVER 8 MONTHS

The Client: a brand selling digital and mobile equipment, one of the market leaders with an online store and an extensive network of brick-and-mortar stores in 43 cities across Ukraine and more than 1,000,000 items offered.

The Niche: eCommerce project, digital and mobile equipment.

The Task: to optimize current advertising campaigns, find new, more effective solutions, scale advertising, and grow income by 2-3 times.

The Goals:

• optimize the current directions of advertising (TVs, computers, smartphones, accessories)
• launch new efficient advertising campaigns for these directions

• implement Enhanced eCommerce.

The Challenges: intense competition within the niche, a large assortment of goods on the website, constantly changing relevance and availability of goods on the website as well as promotions and offers on the market.

Project Period: July 2021 — now

A short description of the running ad campaigns at the beginning of the project: 

1. only classic search ads worked
2. standard shopping ads weren’t segmented
3. standard display ads weren't divided into audiences
4. there were issues with dynamic remarketing and gathering audiences
5. only Standard eCommerce worked

2.1. Display advertising

We created a new campaign with a separate budget, and segmented the audiences as following:

• interested audience
• wide audience
• common audience with keyword

2.1. Shopping advertising

Feed segmentation

There are over 15,000 items on the website that differ in price, brand, and popularity. From our experience we know that more affordable and more popular goods consume greater parts of daily budgets and ad impressions. To resolve this issue, we decided to work with shopping feeds. We selected segmenting goods based on the price to prevent cheaper goods from consuming traffic and budget and avoid reducing traffic for more expensive items.

Smartphones (shopping)

Segmenting into five categories based on prices:

• 0 to 4,000 UAH

• 4,000 to 6,000 UAH

• 6,000 to 10,000 UAH

• 10,000 to 20,000 UAH

• 20,000+ UAH

eCommerce implementation

Universal Analytics has two main methods of tracking results of eCommerce: Standard and Enhanced.

Standard eCommerce allows you to measure transactions and analyze purchase activity on your site or app. You can see product and transaction information, average order value, ecommerce conversion rate, etc.

Enhanced eCommerce adds additional functionality to standard eCommerce reports: you’ll know when customers add items to their shopping carts and when they complete a purchase. You can also use enhanced ecommerce to identify segments of customers who fall out of the shopping funnel.

The client had only Standard eCommerce set up, so we created a technical task and together with the website programmers implemented Enhanced eCommerce.

The results of shopping campaigns (October 2021 — February 2022)

Based on the data we obtained in the course of the campaigns, the best results as to queries, sales, and, consequently, conversions were driven by the Smartphones segment in the price category of 6,000 — 10,000 UAH.

Advertising during the war (May — July 2022)

At the beginning of the full-scale invasion on February 24 the advertising campaign was stopped, but, on the client’s approval, we started to gradually resume advertising activities at the end of April. After discussing it with the client, we switched ads off in the VIP and another expensive segment, keeping only the average price segment. Also, we highlighted supporting Ukraine and the Armed Forces of Ukraine in ad copies.

Conclusions and Recommendations

• advertising online stores is challenging and requires a holistic marketing approach, thorough investigation of the market, in-depth competition analysis, and developing custom strategies;
• it is worth focusing on Shopping campaigns with shopping feeds, implementing segmentation according to prices, categories, and product types;
• it is important to monitor transactions and revenue coming from advertising — for this, it is crucial to set up Enhanced eCommerce, gradually switching to Google Analytics 4 and analyzing all sources of traffic;
• it is vital to monitor competitors’ advertising and pricing, market trends, and seasonal fluctuations;
• by constantly optimizing advertising campaigns and performing A/B tests, you can control and scale advertising activities and grow conversion rates.

The Client. An online store selling used and new auto parts. A large assortment of products, more than 30 million items.

Location. Spain.

The Niche. An online store.

Languages. English and Spanish.

The Tasks. SEO support at the site launch stage, technical optimization.

SEO GOALS:

• The maximum number of indexed product pages
• Relevant organic traffic

KPIs:

• Technical optimization before launching the site
• Optimization of product pages
• Strengthening the site’s backlink profile
• Increasing the number of lead-generating search queries
• Growing the site’s search traffic

CHALLENGES:

After analyzing the niche, we realized that the product pages needed optimization since most users searched for auto parts by their numbers rather than by name or category. With more than 30 million product pages to promote, indexing is crucial: the more products are indexed, the more likely the user will buy the product from the client, and not from their competitor.

• A new site with zero visibility in search results
• Indexing issues
• Poor technical optimization
• Competing with aggregator sites
• No on-page optimization

CASE DESCRIPTION

STAGE 1

• Technical audit of the site
• Analysis of the niche and the main competitors
• Collecting the semantic core for product categories

STAGE 2

• Implementation of technical recommendations with a strong focus on rich snippets and  /sitemapindex.xml sitemap 
• Meta tags (title, description, H1)
• On-page optimization of categories (car brands and major parts categories) and product pages

STAGE 3

• Recommendations for internal linking
• Link building strategy

ADDITIONAL WORKS

• Creating separate pages for products with the same numbers

It is important because there can be several products with the same number but different in condition and quality. Such a page contains a listing of products with the same number, and the user can choose the most relevant one.

THE RESULTS

WE GOT 3.4 MILLION INDEXED PAGES IN LESS THAN A YEAR, MOST OF WHICH ARE PRODUCT PAGES

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE: from 0 to 5000 clicks per day and 130,000 impressions per day with an average position of 12

CONCLUSIONS

This case vividly demonstrates the importance of niche analysis. Thanks to it, we focused on the promotion of product pages instead of categories.

Over the year, we performed a range of tasks to achieve the project’s main goal, and, as a result, more than three million pages were indexed. According to Ahrefs, over this time, the site has been receiving 10,000 organic traffic monthly, 1,230,000 clicks and 3,950,000 impressions for relevant queries. The average position is 12 for all requests, indicating high-quality product page optimization. Despite the fact that the site is new, we managed to achieve excellent results in a highly-competitive niche.

Now we continue working on indexing even more pages, improving the website’s link profile, and increasing the authority of the domain. This case is a successful example of high-quality website optimization, as the results described above show.