German Luxury Fashion Brand Japanese PPC
Client Details
| Industry | Luxury consumer goods/fashion. |
| Product | Leather bags and accessories. |
| Target market | High-end Japanese consumers. |
| Objective | Increasing sales via the e-commerce channel by pay-per-click advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Google. |
What We Achieved
Project Details
We worked closely with the Client to establish the best PPC advertising channels in Japan and decided to leverage Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, Display, and Shopping Ads. By understanding the Japanese audiences on each platform, characteristics of the Client’s industry, and ongoing trends we were able to recommend only platforms that were perfectly fitted for the German luxury fashion brand and allowed for the best possible return on the investment.
On the social channels, we developed an advanced funnel structure for the campaigns, ad sets, and ads, as well as an ongoing message and targeting testing framework. This approach allowed us to reach all the audiences that were relevant to the Client, especially by leveraging:
- Email list targeting
- Lookalike audience targeting (based on website visitors and newsletter subscribers)
- Creative manual interest-based targeting
- Targeting audiences that interacted with other ads (driving customers down the sales funnel)
- Remarketing to shoppers who visited the online store but did not finalize the purchase
On top of that, we kept learning from the monthly reports and continued optimizing the message and targeting month by month.
For search ads, we dedicated a lot of time to comprehensive keyword research in Japanese, which allowed us to discover keywords that were closely mapped to the German luxury fashion brand offering, enjoyed good search volume, and had a relatively low cost per click.
Similar to the social ads, we diligently tracked and reported on the performance data and used it to keep optimizing the ROI of our ads. We also applied our testing framework, with regard to message and targeting to the Google Ads.
For more details on Humble Bunny’s advanced PPC approach, you can reference our blogs on ‘Japanese PPC – 10 Principles of a Strong Campaign’ and ‘How to Build a Winning Japanese PPC Strategy’.
*Google Analytics overview report (data hidden for privacy reasons).
Learnings Extraction Through Testing and Custom Audience Creation
Our innate curiosity for testing both messaging and targeting on an ongoing basis allowed us to keep extracting valuable learnings that we leveraged for optimizing the performance of our campaigns.
For example, within our brand awareness social ads we tested different focuses of brand presentation and their impact on customer engagement. Some message variations included:
- Focus on craftsmanship and handmade manufacturing
- Brand heritage and long, rich corporate history
- Assuring the quality and attention to details
Another example, within our conversion-focused ads, is testing messages revolving around product features (giving customers detailed information about the product and it’s unique value points) versus lifestyle messages, speaking to the aspirational and inspirational emotions of the audience.
On the targeting side, a great example of a valuable test was running our ads for 3 different conversion-oriented audiences:
- Engaged shoppers (people who recently bought some product through social ads)
- Shoppers looking for gifts (for example users who have upcoming birthday or anniversary)
- Shoppers interested in other luxury leather brands/competitors
On top of that, we have limited each of the above groups to have a common interest in luxury goods and bags in order to keep the interest close to German luxury fashion products.
Extracting learnings from those separate targeting initiatives allowed us to systematically narrow our customer audiences, and deliver them more targeted and tailored messages with our ads.
Sales Conversion Optimization via Elevate: Humble Bunny’s Cultural Testing Engine: Elevate
Elevate is a learning and optimization engine, based on using a hybrid manual and machine-learning system. It allows companies to learn what makes their customers make purchase decisions and spread that knowledge across all of the sales and marketing initiatives while improving conversion, traffic, and brand affinity.
As one of the main characteristics of Japanese consumer culture is high uncertainty avoidance, we dedicated our efforts to testing this cultural model for our Client. By creating new product descriptions and images that were aimed at providing more details about the features and benefits of the product we strived to raise the certainty and make the purchase decision easier for consumers in the Japanese market.
It allowed us not only to extract learnings about the nature of German luxury fashion brand customers in Japan but also translated into increased traffic and performance of the optimized versions of product listings:
By understanding the underlying cultural model of uncertainty avoidance that drives so many purchase decisions of Japanese consumers, we tapped into the marketing potential that was way beyond usual testing and optimization schemes.
CTR Optimization
*Search Ads report (data hidden for privacy reasons).
By our constant testing efforts, on the side of ad copy, imagery, targeting, as well as culture models we increased the clickthrough rate (a ratio of how many people who saw our ads clicked on them) by 176.53% monthly on average in the first 5 months. On top of that, we were able to boost the total volume of link clicks on our social ads by 69.86% on average over the first 5 months.
This is one of the most important optimizations in terms of improving the ad efficiency: showing more engaging ad creatives to more precisely targeted audiences led to raising the number of interested users clicking on the ad and visiting the Client’s store. This in turn translated into a better return on the ad investment for our Client.
Brand Awareness and Impressions Increase
*Social ads report overview page (data hidden for privacy reasons).
Over the course of the project, we kept building brand awareness for the German luxury fashion brand in the Japanese market by increasing the number of high-quality impressions and tailored ad copy. Our top month-on-month performance highlights included boosting ad recall lift (defined by Facebook as an estimate of the number of additional people who may remember seeing our ads, if asked, within 2 days) as a measure for brand awareness, by 91.16% on average over the first 3 months.
For a brand like our Client, that needed to compete with strong and well-established local competitors, while being relatively new to the Japanese market – increasing the recognition, and top-of-the-mind awareness was crucial for the success. This was a preliminary step before heavily focusing on and improving conversions.