Intertop Case Study: Discovery Ads for Placing Ads on YouTube and Gmail

Results: CPA dwindled by 22 times and the total number of conversions increased by 6.5 times.

The Client

Intertop is the Ukrainian market leader for the offline sales of brand clothing and footwear. This brand has been active in Ukraine since 1994. The company’s online shop brings together all multi- and monobrand retail stores into a unified and all-encompassing model.

The Challenge

During our cooperation, we decided to try out a new (at that time) instrument — Discovery Ads. Today, anyone can use it, but only its beta version was available back then.

Discovery Ads are targeted at users who are not interested in anything particular and are open to different offers. The main goal of such campaigns is to offer users fresh content that they could potentially find interesting.

The Solution

For the duration of the test period, which lasted from January 16 to February 10, 2020, we launched six campaigns with the aim of reaching the target CPA.

The following targeting was used within the framework of the campaigns:

• the audience of users similar to those who placed an order;
• the audience of interested buyers in the categories of clothing/footwear;
• a special audience of intended users who make a purchase for each brand. While setting up the audience of intended users, we created audiences not solely according to the key words in categories such as footwear/clothing, but we also created these for each particular brand.

The Results

During the test period of the Discovery Ads campaign, we came second after other media campaigns only in the category of the number of impressions. In other categories, we achieved total dominance.

Comparison between indicators of the GDN (Google Display Network) and Discovery Ads campaigns

Here are the key takeaways.

• CPA dropped by 22 times.
• The total number of conversion increased by more than 6.5 times.
• CPC decreased by 3.5 times.
• CTR increased by 2.6 times.
• CPM shrank by 1.3 times.
• The costs dropped by 3 times.

It is worth noting that the bulk of conversions (about 80%) were view-through conversions, further proving the importance of taking post-view conversions into consideration while assessing media campaigns.

The results of these campaigns could also be attributed to the fact that the ads were shown to a "cold" audience with the exception of users who had visited the website before.

The total number of conversions = view-through conversions + click conversions + cross-device conversions.

Read more:

• Eva success story: how to recoup advertising campaigns with and without Google Smart Shopping.
• Secunda Success story: how to make 400% ROI of the campaigns, using targeting ads on Facebook.
• OLX (by Naspers) Success Story: 50,000 Clients Ready to Launch Their Online Stores.