Case Study: PPC campaign for auction portal Aukro.sk

In 6 months we increased the number of registrations from Google by more than 220%, while the registration price was decreased by 30%.

Aukro used to administer its campaigns in the Google AdWords system internally. Cooperation with Ataxo started with extensive audit of the campaigns current status and by estimating results that can be achieved. Optimisation of campaigns was planned to take 6 months while Aukro determined two objectives: ambitiously increase the number of registrations in its portal and at the same time decrease the costs of acquiring them.

Set-up of the campaign

In the course of campaigns optimisation and enhancement Ataxo focused principally on the following two points:

Complete re-structuring of campaigns

Structure of Aukro campaigns was not sufficiently in-depth. Ad groups did not corre-spond with the structure of categories on the web and some parts merged huge number of heterogeneous keywords. At re-structuring of ad groups Ataxo strived to utilise existing results and all positive aspects of campaigns as much as possible. Structure of ad groups was elaborated in more details in order to correspond with both the division of product categories and also the optimisation requirements.

Advertising texts and their target pages

Several hundreds of texts of different types were added to the campaigns in order to facilitate testing of their successfulness from the perspective of click-through rate and also the conversion rate. We tested different types of texts, e.g. brand, call-to-action, rhymes and variants of URL addresses modifications. Ataxo suggested that Aukro should make modifications in the internal division of product categories and this gradually allowed for constantly more precise targeting of advertising formats into the unique and relevant target pages.

Utilisation of Google content network

Campaigns in the content network were originally set up as copies of search engines campaigns. The first modification step thus involved reworking of cam-paigns based on the principal of thematic groups, which we chose by the analysis of user target groups.

Through utilisation of content network we also tackled the issue of addressing both the buying and also selling participants of auctions. Whilst advertising in search engines addresses the users who intentionally seek the opportunities for buying or selling, the content network is able inspire ordinary owners of futilities, nifty teen-ager producers or small companies who can use Aukro for selling their own products.

In addition to the text advertising, at the end of the 6-month period we also launched the visual advertising format to the content network. Besides real conversions, we tested and evaluated also the new metrics of View-through conversions in the visual campaigns.

During the 6 months of working with campaigns we managed to increase the ratio of conversions from the content network from 0% to almost 20% out of the total number of conversions plus considerable volume of View-through conversions.

Targeting the advertising campaign

Acquiring new sources of web traffic for Aukro was one of our key tasks. Volume of campaigns was increased not only due to expansion into the content network and different advertising formats but also as a result of setting up alternative targeting of campaigns – both in the search engines and also in the content network. As we were interested in users who are in the Slovak Republic we experimented especially with targeting on users with minority set-up of language preferences for searching or users who move along on websites created in other languages than Slovak. In this way we achieved cheaper conversions from brand-new sources.

Coordination and team work

Scope of Aukro campaigns required fast, massive changes, and necessitated simulta-neous cooperation of several administrators of campaigns, thorough coordination of their work and very flexible communication with Aukro; it also requested support of Aukro web administrators and analytical instruments, graphic designers, and least but not last, intensive communication of commercial representatives from both the companies. Such results could not be achieved without functioning communication within the Ataxo team and externally with Aukro.

Performance measurements by Google analytical tools

There were two indicators defined in order to evaluate the campaign success: de-crease in price of user registration and increase in the overall number of users. Results were evaluated through integrated instrument Conversion Measurements in AdWord; it allowed us to get quickly oriented in campaign success or failure, and also by means of analytical instrument Google Analytics, which we jointly set up with Aukro in order to obtain as many necessary details as possible.

Campaign results

Within six months under the Ataxo administration the campaign showed very positive trends of success indicators under consideration. Despite the fact that we had to deal with significant decrease in the search volume at the start of summer holidays and during the Christmas and New Year celebrations period, the total number of acquired conversion was successfully increased by 220%, whilst at the same time the price of conversion dropped by 30%.

Development of number of conversions and conversion prices

We wish Aukro commercial success in the future!