As the year comes to an end, it’s that time again: reflect on past. That’s exactly what Google is doing in their official AdWords blog, celebrating their customers success by talking about some of their more famous clients and where they’ve gone in the past year.
One of those clients is L’Oréal Paris, who has been using Google’s Search insights to get ahead of the public trends and what products consumers are interested in — which we know is ever changing. By doing that, they were able to build upon their hair color products and specifically increased sales by 50% with one of their products, the Feria Ombré. By using insights, they were able to not only tell what customers are interested in, but specifically what customers, and how to reach them. With their success alone, you will see many more companies hopping on the insight tool in an attempt to get a competitive edge.
You can see the L’Oreal Paris team talking about how they used AdWords to improve their business here:
The success of Sephora over the last year is also a big credit to what Google can do. While they’ve built up to over 700 stores globally, they have been able to target more specific customers while developing an app that engages customers when they are in the store — allowing them to compare prices, get more information about products and sizes, and much more.
Hyatt hotels recently started a new campaign: recruit female business travelers to book at their hotels. They narrowed down their target audience to a very specific group, and Google was able to deliver targeted content. Exposing the Hyatt brand to over 17 million views, using Google’s media-rich features such as YouTube, they were able to pay 30% less of an average advertising campaign.
Google recently launched an Ad Customizer, and using that has allowed Extra Space Storage to advertise a specific message to a specific target, and a different message to another customer, allowing each message to be tailored and relevant for each consumer. That led ESS to gain 113% increase in their Clickthrough rate (CTR) — meaning that feature alone doubled the amount of customers who read their ad and click on the website to learn more.
1-800 Flowers is obviously a web (and phone)-based company, meaning that web advertising has been the heart of their business for years. By using Google’s click to call adds, they were able to directly track a 7% increase in conversions and a 10% increase in AdWords revenue to the click to call campaigns. For any company that really makes most of their business off phone calls (including local small businesses!), it can come as a great success.
Finally, PointIt, a marketing agency based in Seattle, ran a study on their clients to try to make Google’s automatic bid program on ads the most efficient, allowing each ad to reach the most targeted people at the lowest price possible. While most people think setting their own bids is the most cost effective way to run AdWords campaigns, they were able to prove that with automatic bidding, their customers saw a 47% increase in return of their advertisements, including an 8% increase in overall revenues, all due to Google’s automatic bidding features.
It truly has been an exciting year in Google’s marketing department, with AdWords being more successful today in delivering clients to businesses than ever before. They continue to introduce new tools to help businesses such as the Ad Customizer, Search Insights, Click-To-Call, and much more, just released this past year. They have many more ideas and features set to be released in 2015, so you can bet they will continue to build on a great year.
