Walmart Launch with Google AdWords Campaign
Client Challenge
Our client is a North American consumer packaged goods manufacturer with a global client base and three unique target markets. Recently added to the shelf at 1200 Wal-Mart Stores, our client needed to drive sales volume to ensure an ongoing commitment from Wal-Mart shelf space at the rest of their 4500 nationwide locations. The marketing communication challenges for our client involved driving consumers to Walmart and convincing them to buy our client’s products once they were there.
Hypothesis
To support a Launch – we will use Google AdWords, Google Display Ad Retargeting, and Social Media to drive customers into stores to buy product. We will use a dedicated landing page to offer a promotion that supports this goal.
Solution
We chose to launch a landing page that with a call to action that supported a form sign-up. Upon signing up, a consumer received an email with a mail-in rebate when they purchased the product at Wal-Mart. This accomplished the dual-goal of targeting visitors through the display network while also capturing email addresses for direct marketing integration. The website used both on-page and off-page SEO as well as modern infrastructure that worked well on smartphones and tablets (where we identified that a majority of our clients’ search would be). We used Google Search, Display, and Youtube Video Ads to drive traffic and Google Analytics to measure the success and behavior. Ads were delivered using a proprietary “micro-geo-targeting” code that we developed to ensure that Ads were only delivered to consumers within a 20 mile radius of the Wal-Mart stores that carried our customers product and not the ones that didn’t.
Results
Our client wanted to run TV Ads at the same time but were not sure if these TV ads or or the Digital Ads would perform better. We established a campaign timeline which allowed us to compare TV alone, TV with AdWords, and AdWords alone to determine success of each medium. We found that although the combined effort produced the most sales, when pausing the TV campaign and running only Digital Ads, we were able to achieve more than 60% of the sell through at the store at 10% of the cost.. Budgets for AdWords were less than 10% of the overall budget resulting in a 1200% increase in advertising ROI.
Conclusion
By shifting their TV budget to Digital Advertising, our client was able to better measure the impact of their ad spend and recognize significant saving while maintaining in store sales. The savings not only gave them better control over their profits, but also gave them significantly better insight into effective messaging, demographics, and and regionality. It was this set of insights that provided our client with higher lift and, subsequently, stronger conversion rates.