70% revenue growth for clothing store during war

At the preparation stage, already during the full-scale war, we began to change our promotion strategy and analyze factors:

1. which geo-locations and regions to choose for advertising;
2. what kind of promotions to use to increase sales and increase the value of online orders;
3. how to build advertising campaigns that will be effective and bring more conversions;
4. budget allocation that will bring the planned number of sales for the online store;
5. which queries should be promoted so that the site’s position and traffic do not sink but grow.

Based on these questions, we began to study Google Analytics statistics and analyze the current situation in the country. For further advertising, we identified the main regions that do not have active hostilities and have an increase in the displaced population.

Due to active shelling, people have started moving from their cities to other cities, and because of this, the top 10 regions include: Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Khmelnytsky. We also decided not to exclude the regions that remained without hostilities from the geo, as they were significant even before the war started.

At the time of the launch, the situation in Kharkiv began to recover, more and more people began to return, so this city was also left out.

As a result, contextual advertising was launched in Lviv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro and Kyiv.

Before the war, the project was advertised in Ukrainian, but the number of Ukrainian-speaking users was much lower compared to the post-war figures.

• January-February 2022 – 22% of Ukrainian-speaking users
• April-May 2022 – 34% of Ukrainian-speaking users
• June-July 2022 – 32% of Ukrainian-speaking users

We noticed a change in conversion time: before the war, 57% of users converted on the first day and these conversions generated 60% of revenue, but after the start of the war, this number decreased to 53%, and these conversions generated 51% of revenue. This means that users became more economical and less decisive (at least in the first months of the situation) to make any purchases, as they did not understand what would happen next and what to expect, whether to buy it now or to manage without it for now.

All advertising activities can be conditionally divided into 4 large blocks, these are Contextual Display Advertising (CDA), Video Advertising (YouTube), Product Advertising (Shopping and Performance Max) and Search Advertising

1.YouTube video advertising

We used video advertising to inform users about new promotions and the opening of new stores in Ukrainian cities.

To maximize the reach of users, we used the following video ad formats:

1.1 Bumper Ads – 6 seconds long with no skipping option

1.2 In-Stream ads – 15 seconds long with no skipping option

1.3 In-Stream ads – 30 seconds long with a skippable product feed.

2. Advertising in the contextual display network (CDN)

With the help of advertising in the Display Network, we informed users about promotions and sales on the website. We used graphic banners for this purpose. We changed creatives once every one or two weeks, which allowed us not to bore users with the same offer.

3. Product advertising – Shopping and Performance Max

Like most eCommerce projects, the main source of income for the project is product advertising. Depending on the season, product groups were defined with a priority of impressions. Ads were shown in Google search, on YouTube, in Gmail, in the Google Display Network.

4. Search advertising 

With the help of search advertising campaigns, we collected traffic with user queries by product category and company brand.

Thanks to contextual advertising, we managed to bring 29% more users to the site. At the same time, we received 38% more transactions. Revenue increased by 51%.

The creatives continued to use the brand’s corporate identity and did not significantly change the message, only the propositions.

The largest number of conversions and value for e-commerce was brought by the “warm audience”, while the “cold” audience usually yielded more expensive results. New users turned into a retarget audience after the first stages of the sales funnel, so our task was to attract targeted traffic correctly and to interact with them properly when ads were shown again.

To describe in more detail:

1. the first stage: attracting new audiences from 3 or more segments to the site, with optimization for “Add to cart” or “Start checkout”. Thus, we bring an interested audience to the site, which makes a conversion;
2. the second stage: repeated display of ads for a specific product to those who were previously interested in the assortment. We use the goal “Promotion of goods by catalog”.

On a regular basis, we worked with “warm” audiences of regular customers who interact with the website and social media, as well as with databases of existing customers. To increase sales of the online store, we interacted with all audiences in several steps and stimulated sales. According to statistics, “warm audiences” brought in an average of 37% fewer purchases than the audience that first visited the site.

Compared to the pre-war situation, the statistics have partially changed. Below are the results of one month AFTER the outbreak of war.

June-July 2022:

• advertising budget decreased by 4.69%:
• the number of users decreased by 6.26%, and new users decreased by 13.38%;
• the number of transactions increased by 10.53% in direct proportion,
• while revenue increased by 18.08%.

In addition, when analyzing e-commerce, we paid attention to the growth of indirect conversions. Associated conversions from targeted advertising increased by 126.98%. Conversions by last click with direct interaction increased by 34.09%, and the cost of this conversion decreased by 35.25%.

In other channels, conversions increased from 9.02% to 116.29%, so it was targeted advertising that brought the largest number of conversions from the paid advertising channel.

In Facebook’s advertising account, the cost of starting a checkout became 10% more expensive than it was before the war. The cost of the final conversion was 16% higher than the cost we received BEFORE the war. At the same time, the number of associated conversions has increased by 27.57% compared to the beginning of winter. To back up the statistics above, we compared the results of paid Facebook advertising with organic traffic, which decreased by 27.32%. This means that, given the decline in demand for goods, targeted advertising still managed to increase transactions on the site and almost equalize revenue with the pre-war period.

The main tasks we faced were:

• increase the visibility of the site;
• increase traffic from the Google Organic channel;
• increase the number of conversions from organic search.

Analysis period: July 2022-October 2022

The initial start of SEO promotion work was planned for February, but the outbreak of hostilities made adjustments and the start of work was postponed to the summer months.

What were the nuances of SEO work?

While in previous years, we could talk about the clear advantage of the Russian-language version of the site, in 2022 we saw a significant increase in the frequency of queries in Ukrainian.

As you can see, some of them have a constant upward trend. Undoubtedly, such dynamics influenced the adjustment of the media budget allocation.

GEO: Ukraine

At the beginning of the project, we started with a technical audit of the website, which allowed us to identify errors that negatively affect the growth of website visibility.

Based on the results of the audit, a technical task was drawn up to eliminate technical errors, as well as to introduce additional elements that can positively affect the growth of visibility or CTR of the site’s pages in search results.

Many parameters were checked, such as broken links, duplicate meta tags, duplicate content output, redirect chains, pages with mixed content, duplicate H headers, missing meta tags, and pages with the noindex tag.

The semantics collection work was divided into stages, which helped to avoid long downtime while making changes to the site.

KeywordPlanner, Ahrefs, and Serpstat tools were used to collect semantics.

We also analyzed the link mass and developed a strategy for building it up.

SEO texts were written and placed for the listing pages, which helped to improve the site’s visibility in search engines and attract more customers.

Graph of changes in organic traffic since the start of website promotion

Graph of changes in organic traffic since the beginning of the year, where you can see how the beginning of the war in Ukraine affected traffic

Graph of changes in the average website position since the beginning of February 2022

Graph of changes in the average position of the site since the start of the work

Graph of the number of words in the TOP-30 since the start of work

Below are screenshots of changes in the positions of search query clusters since February 2022 and changes in the positions of search query clusters since the start of work

Results for 5 months in SEO:

• Growth in organic traffic – 128%
• Increase in website visibility – 24%
• Number of words in the top 30 – 25% (638 words)
• ROI 980.36%.
• ROAS 1080.36%.