Driving In-Store Sales When the Overall Market Was Struggling
The Challenge
Bassett Furniture partnered with Tinuiti and Adthena to understand the in-store sales impact of increasing non-brand Click Share for the ‘living’, ‘bedroom’, and ‘dining’ categories in two Designated Market Areas (DMAs) with brick-and-mortar locations.
Tinuiti’s Paid Search team developed a test campaign that targeted the same core demographic in the DMAs as a control campaign and found not only success but valuable insights for Bassett Furniture’s overall search strategy.
Results
+3.9%
In-store sales (YoY)
-15.5%
Overall market (YoY)
*4-month test period for the three chosen categories
How We Did It
For the test campaign, Click Share was increased to be in the top seven for those markets, up from below 18th in their respective categories. Store sales were measured against the rest of the overall market on a Year-over-Year (YoY) basis for the categories mentioned above. Budget for the test campaign was about 5% of the total monthly budget over the course of the four-month test flight.
DMAs were broken out into product and store campaigns with a focus on utilizing 80% of budget for product terms. The Tinuiti team monitored Adthena data to give a better understanding of the market share gained by increasing visibility of product terms.
The control campaign received a large majority of its traffic from location and “furniture store” queries. The test campaign broke out specific categories into its own campaign. It disregarded legacy campaign KPIs and solely focused on increased Click Share with an eye on how much it would cost to own a spot in the top seven.
The campaign ran for four months and followed in-store sales at each DMA, while comparing to the overall market over the same period. The DMAs used in the test saw a +3.9% in-store sales increase YoY for the categories advertised compared to the overall market—which saw a 15.5% sales decline. During the test period, direct traffic to the site decreased by 22.5% YoY in test markets versus 30% for the overall market. In the months compared to the overall market, the DMAs only lost one month in YoY category sales percent change compared to the overall market.
All of this helped prove value in product-themed search terms, which didn’t show nearly the return that location-themed terms showed in the engine. This took Tinuiti a step closer to building out a more coherent, revenue-driving search strategy.
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