Promoting complex technology products doesn’t usually involve experimenting with new channels. But if you take a chance and apply them together with traditional tools, you can achieve great results. When Bosch launched the updated Zamo III laser rangefinder, they asked us to run a reach advertising campaign.
Using paid traffic tools, we exceeded our planned click-through rates by a factor of 10 and got a cool post-click. The deep engagement was given by Yandex.Zen, a platform that we did not believe in at first, and from which we did not expect anything. Nevertheless, it brought the most clicks to Yandex.Market. The advertising campaign was so successful that Yandex officially cited our case as an example.
Here is a detailed description of what we did and how we did it.
The challenge: Bringing an updated product to market
In spring last year Bosch asked us to make a reach campaign for promotion of laser rangefinders of new generation – BOSCH Zamo III enhanced with new adapters for different tasks (more about the product below). It was necessary to tell the wide audience about the appearance of the new product, to show its usefulness and to arouse interest of potential buyers.
Daria Razhanskaya, marketing manager of BOSCH in Russia and CIS was working with us on the client side. She came to us with a clear goal and stated right away what kind of advertising was required. We had to choose certain channels and accurately distribute the budget: we were given a limited amount of money, and we had to carefully plan how to spend it as effectively as possible
The expert’s point of view
Ekaterina Malinovskaya, leading manager of media advertising at Ashmanov and Partners:
How not to “drain” the budget and not go beyond it? Choose the right medium. This is an important competence, which distinguishes an experienced specialist from an inexperienced one: a competent assessment of the goals and objectives of the client, comparison with the profit from the chosen site, screening inefficient sites among them. If you can not intelligently select the site – you will waste the budget. Of course, is important and the amount allocated: in our case it was quite enough for an experiment: not too excessive, and not on the minimum threshold, that is, the reserve for experimentation was.
We knew by experience that the programmatic and contextual advertising in the Google CMS and РСЯ will give good results. These are our proven tools for outreach and engagement, so in the first place we offered them. And then Daria suggested: “Why don’t we experiment with Zen?”
Our companies have been working together for a long time, so we were actually pretty confident that we knew pretty well who the target audience of Bosch tools were. And that that audience wasn’t in Zen (spoiler: we were wrong). So we really wanted to give up using it. But Daria insisted! Testing the new idea sparked her genuine interest, and we gave in.
We understood that, in principle, we could achieve the engagement of some part of the users of the Zen site, but we could not plan specific performance indicators. So we discussed with the client that we would allocate only part of the budget for the experiment with the new channel, and the main funds would be spent on context and programmatic. And so we agreed on that. And we began to prepare for the campaign.
Preparation: understand the product and the audience
The Ashmanov and Partners team begins each project with an in-depth analysis. In the case of Bosch, we needed to understand the product in detail and confirm our hypotheses about the target audience.
The Zamo III laser rangefinder is a measuring tool from Bosch’s DIY (DIY – Do It Yourself) line for do-it-yourselfers. It comes with three attachments: a measuring tape for measuring small sections and individual objects, a measuring wheel (curvimeter) for curved and uneven surfaces, and a level.
BOSCH Zamo III
We started thinking, who can use a laser rangefinder? We assumed that the device is quite specific, so professional repairmen, construction teams, architects, commercial designers are more likely to cope with it. In general – a narrow audience. Will we be able to get any good results if our hypothetical category of users does not read Zen? We had our doubts and decided to warn the client in advance.
But that’s not how it turned out.
At the meeting, Daria began to explain to us that the Zamo III is actually a universal device for the home. It is no more complicated than a regular centimeter and a bubble level. With its help it is easy to measure a wire or a piece of fabric for curtains, to hang a picture evenly or to measure a child’s height – in other words to do all that is done by most ordinary people without professional competence, just with slightly different tools or without them, by the old way “by eye”, so to say.
According to her it turned out that the audience of the product was so wide that all our preliminary analysis could be thrown in the trash and we could redo the segmentation from the very beginning.
Opinion of an expert
Daria Razhanskaya, marketing manager of BOSCH in Russia and CIS:
We are always involved in all discussions about advertising strategy with the contractor and try to participate in all phases of the project. Bosch products are often technically complex. And when launching a new product, it is often necessary to explain in detail who it is for and why it is needed. By investing time in working with the contractor and helping him see and recognize the value of our tools for end users, we are helping ourselves. That way we can be sure that the advertising campaign will be effective and increase sales.
We looked at the product and the audience with completely different eyes. As a result, we identified the following segments with interests:
- interior design;
- furniture and interior
- renovation of private homes;
- women’s sites and forums;
- drawing lovers;
- hobbies with their own hands;
- needlework;
- modeling;
- do-it-yourself (DIY);
- 3D designers and clients;
- interested in building services;
- gadgets;
- landscape design;
- architectural design.
The age of most users fell into the range from 25 to 44 years (63%).
And this audience was already present in sufficient numbers in Zen. We checked with the client to make sure we identified the target audience correctly, and requested uploads from Yandex, which confirmed this.
As a result we planned the budget in such a way as to run the campaign in three selected channels for one month. We created a landing page, creatives for targeting and in anticipation of construction and repair season we launched the ads.
The landing page for the Zamo III laser rangefinder is still active. The “Buy” button leads to Yandex.Market where you can quickly place your order
For our creatives we picked up images and wrote texts in such a way as to show that Zamo III is a universal device which can be useful for everybody at home.
The results: conversion is better with Google, and engagement is better with Yandex.Zen
Contextual advertising and programmatic gave coverage.
As we predicted, the traditional context and programmatic showed high effectiveness. Using programmatic, we bought displays and brought 8,289 users to the site in a month. 689 of them went to the Market, that is, conversion was 8.31%. For our part, we only checked every week to see if the KPIs for the channel and postclick were achieved.
I was able to exceed my plan. In terms of clicks, for example, by a factor of 2.
We managed to achieve really impressive results in Google’s CMS. We monitored the figures and the achievement of the plan on a weekly basis, adjusted bids, changed settings and optimized the semantic core. As a result, we decreased the cost per click for the month by 90%. The actual number of clicks exceeded the expected number by more than 10 times.
Such a difference between the figures for KMS and RNS can, on the one hand, can be explained by the large number of sites for impressions in Google. On the other hand, it can also be explained by the fact that we configured advertising in different search engines differently: KMS on interests, and the Russian Search Engineers – by keywords.
We met all the KPIs for coverage and achieved a good postclick. Users didn’t just click on the banner, they stayed on the site for a long time and went to the Market.
If you look at the overall visit conversion funnel, you can see how much the results of contextual advertising in Google have surpassed other engagement tools.
But most of all we were surprised by the results of Yandex.Zen. The channel with which we experimented brought the greatest number of clicks to Market.
Yandex.Zen promoted more engagement
Zen offers two advertising formats – articles and videos – and two promotion strategies – pay per impression for reach or pay per read for engagement.
We chose “engagement” and took advantage of a program to support new advertisers, in which Zen team writers write three articles for free the first time they refill their advertising account (here we really overestimated them, but first things first).
The topics of our promotional publications were:
- “Three things the BOSCH Zamo III Set laser rangefinder can do.”
- “How one device can make your life easier if you like repairs, design and rearranging.”
- “From Trinket to Essential Gadget: How I Changed My Mind About the Rangefinder.”
Since one of the goals was to test the effectiveness of the channel for advertising Bosch products, the project manager, Ekaterina Malinovskaya, lead manager for media advertising at Ashmanov & Partners, was in charge of setting up and running the campaign. She set up the targeting manually and about every two days monitored the main parameters: the number of clicks to the publication, the percentage of read-throughs and the time of reading.
Over the course of a month we experimented with publications and optimized everything that could be optimized:
- we changed the price per read-through;
- changing settings of display by region, age, gender and devices;
- and we’ve included a variety of photos in articles;
- and improved headlines and text.
Bosch specialists got involved in the work on the publications. In the articles of Yandex’s commercial authors, the same mistake was present as in ours at the beginning of the project: wrong understanding of the audience and, consequently, wrong positioning of the product. Because of this, we had to rewrite whole paragraphs in some places, which caused certain dissatisfaction on the part of the client.
Opinion of the expert
Darya Razhanskaya, Marketing Manager of BOSCH in Russia and CIS:
Of course, one would not expect the Zen authors to dive deep into the specifics of laser rangefinders. Especially since the articles were conditionally free. We were ready to put the tool to the test for the editors, as we usually do, but what came out was what came out, the texts could be worked with. The quality of content always plays a key role. Useful, literate, engaging content attracts the user, and to a lesser extent, the mechanics of its distribution. Expectations from the publications were somewhat higher, which Catherine and I reported to Zen representatives as an area for improvement.
Nevertheless, as a result of all our manipulations with settings, prices and texts, we still managed to achieve high audience engagement. Post-click analysis of the entire campaign using Google Analytics showed that the maximum number of users went to the Market exactly from advertising publications in Yandex.Zen. All in all, we got 5,540 clicks in the Market over a month. Of these, 3,182 conversions came from three Zen articles.
The figures obtained mean that we targeted the right audience and generally ran the campaign correctly. And it turned out to be successful even according to Yandex, and they published our case on their page.
The article “How One Appliance Can Make Your Life Easier If You Love Repair, Design, and Remodeling” brought 1,242 users to Market.
The figures obtained mean that we targeted the right audience and generally ran the campaign correctly. And it turned out to be successful even according to Yandex, and they published our case on their page. As a result, we can say that Yandex.Zen as an advertising channel has undoubted advantages.
The platform allows advertisers to see in their “personal cabinet” such indicators as the number of impressions and follow-ups and influence them. Special mention should be made of Zen’s successful Scroll2Site mechanics, which really works to increase engagement. When a user reaches the end of an article, he is prompted to click through to the advertiser’s site to continue the interaction. All they have to do is scroll down the screen. The seamless transition turns out to be natural and unobtrusive, and the most interested users go to the site, increasing conversion rates.
To summarize: use proven tools, but don’t be afraid to experiment
To say that Zen will uniquely suit everyone, we will not. Before deciding to place native ads on the platform, you need to make sure that you have found your relevant audience there.
Expert opinion
Ekaterina Malinovskaya, Lead Media Advertising Manager at Ashmanov & Partners:
Yandex.Zen is actively developing right now. The platform is constantly updating and improving its algorithms, so if some promotion techniques worked yesterday, not tomorrow they will give the same good result. It turns out that you must either regularly work with the platform yourself – to monitor changes, to be aware of the news, or to contact experts. Otherwise you may spend a lot of money, not get the desired results and think that advertising in Zen does not work.
The main conclusion that we drew from our work on the Bosch project is that not only standard tools are suitable for advertising complex products. You can experiment with new channels, but you should be guided in your choice not by trends or preferences, but by preliminary analysis. Careful study of each new task will allow you to avoid mistakes in campaign settings, positioning, and choice of target audience. And confident experienced experts like us will put them in their place.
Opinion of an expert
Alexey Avdeev, performance group head at Ashmanov and Partners:
When promoting complex products, we pay special attention to experiments and hypothesis testing. It is important not only to conduct the test correctly, but also to interpret its results correctly. The connection of new sources of paid traffic should be accompanied by analysis not only of the source being connected, but also of its impact on other channels. We are ready to dare to experiments, but we obligatory discuss all the details with the client.
The habit of starting a project with an understanding of the task leads to the second obvious conclusion: different clients may need different tools to solve the same problems. Proven channels may not be suitable in specific circumstances. There is no one-size-fits-all tool. In order not to reduce the effectiveness of advertising, the digital-marketing market must be constantly monitored: for news, new tools and algorithm changes. It is good if you have the opportunity to do it yourself. But if you do not, it is worth choosing proven contractors.
Expert opinion
Ekaterina Malinovskaya, leading manager of media advertising at Ashmanov and Partners:
Our main principle for working on projects: “First study the problem from all sides and only then propose a solution”. This approach allows us to obtain a result the client will be satisfied with. There are times when even scaling a project within one customer may require the use of new tools. A channel that worked well once might not work in other circumstances.