May 5, 2020
When drinks retailer Master of Malt conducted internal research across their Shopping campaigns by running Auction Insights reports and assessing customer lifetime value, their competitor analysis showed they could be doing more against other players within their vertical.
Master of Malt’s challenge was to find more ground through Shopping ads in order to grow sales. From products to pricing, they wanted to be as competitive as possible in real-time. But with just a small in-house team, they ideally needed to achieve this without additional time or effort.
Uncorking more revenue. Their first step was to reduce their target return on ad spend to provide greater budget flexibility in the auction. Master of Malt then partnered with By Buy Bye and tasked the comparison shopping service with achieving two goals: expanding their presence in the Shopping ads carousel on key brands, products, and queries, and reaching higher revenue without creating an adverse effect on cost per acquisition. Set up to run in parallel with Master of Malt’s own in-house cost-per-click Shopping ads, the Buy Bye activity was based on a cost-per-acquisition model. This meant Master of Malt simply instructed By Buy Bye of their target return on ad spend. By Buy Bye then covered the cost of the media spend, with Master of Malt only being charged when a retail sale was made.
Behind the scenes at By Buy Bye. By Buy Bye obtained a list Master of Malt’s bestsellers from the previous seven to 30 days, as well as a list of the product pages that achieved the highest impressions. The By Buy Bye team applied these insights towards reaching users actively looking for similar products. Using their proprietary campaign management tool, the By Buy Bye team targeted priority products for Master of Malt via an extremely granular setup of one product per ad group. Search terms were broken down into three segments (non-converting, mid-converting, and top-converting queries). Based on these forecasts of convertibility, the technology assigned different bids for different products. Over time, By Buy Bye’s algorithm automatically optimized the campaigns to drive efficiency gains.
A toast to success. Master of Malt has seen some great results with By Buy Bye: increased margin revenue, sales, and traffic. Month over month, Master of Malt recorded a 21% increase in number of transactions and a 4% increase in net revenue. Their year over year revenue grew by 55%, while ad budget increased by only 5% – confirming a high return on ad spend. What’s more, Google Analytics 360 shows that the customer lifetime value achieved via By Buy Bye is 17% higher than Master of Malt’s standard Shopping campaigns. This means that Master of Malt has seen a 4.3% uplift in search lifetime value per user since going live with By Buy Bye. In bringing in By Buy Bye to run alongside the company’s in-house ads, the Master of Malt team has expanded their coverage without investing significant cost and resource. Ultimately this has allowed them to grow their Shopping revenue in a risk-free way. Looking ahead, By Buy Bye and Master of Malt plan to extend their joint strategy into new markets. They’ll continue to adjust and optimize campaigns based upon seasonality and what’s trending, and to reinforce their success by sharing and applying Google Analytics 360 data to ongoing optimizations.