Goals
- Segment audience according to sales funnel and determine most promising groups
- Maximize sales
Tools used:
- Search ads / Yandex.Direct
- Yandex.Metrica
Period: July 2016
Putting things in context
An individual approach to the client is the foundation of effective communication.
S7 wanted to distinguish groups of promising clients and convey a relevant message to each of them. To achieve this, they segmented users according to the sales funnel and applied separate bid adjustments in search.
Audience segmentation using the sales funnel
S7 divided their audience into five segments according based on how far they had proceeded in the sales funnel:
- “First timers,” who had never visited the site before
- “Bouncers,” who had been on the site but did not view the search results
- Users who viewed search results by flight but didn’t make a reservation
- Users who started but did not complete the reservation process
- “Loyal” users who successfully completed a reservation
Step 1. Set up goals in Yandex.Metrica based on sales funnel
Step 2. Create retargeting lists in Yandex.Direct
Then they created a retargeting list for each level of the sales funnel.
For example, the retargeting list “Step 2: viewed search results” has two rules: users who completed the goal “search results” WITHOUT completing “data entry.”
Retargeting lists must be unique. Their conditions must not overlap, so that no user should fall into more than one, and should be relevant over a period of 30 days.
Step 3. Divide traffic between new and repeat visitors
S7 made four copies of each campaign in the experiment — one for each step of the sales funnel, with its own retargeting list.
The keywords and campaign settings were the same for the four copies. The bid adjustments and ad texts were different, reflecting the user group each campaign focused on.
This setup allowed S7 to personalize their messages, making their ads relevant for each group.
To the right you can see a breakdown of an original campaign and its four copies (experimental campaigns with their own retargeting lists).
Step 4. Show repeat users discounted offers
Step 5. Set bid adjustments for each segment
Quality control
Creating Yandex.Metrica reports
“First timer” campaigns
Creating a report in Yandex.Metrica
Results
Determining the most promising groups
The conversion rate for users that made it to the search results was 6.7 times higher than first-timers. Users who had made a reservation before were 7.7 times more likely to book tickets than new users.
The CPA for these users were 85% and 87% lower respectively.
Most reservations (42%) were made by new users. 33% come from users who started reservation process, and 14% were repeat orders.
