Best & Niche set up Artisan Obscura's Google Ads account when Artisan Obsura realized their company had become a passive money-maker. They offer a unique, high-quality product and knew there was more money to be made if they put in a little effort. Specifically, they make high-end, wood camera accessories. Camera enthusiasts from all over the world buy from Artisan Obscura.
The problem with this new Google Ads Campaign was that not enough people were searching for their niche products. Terms like "hot shoe cover" and "threaded release camera button" got about 10-20 searches a day. And with the average Google Ad running a 2% click-through-rate... well, that wasn't going to boost profits.
And even when people clicked through, we saw a .05% bounce rate. If you know anything about bounce rates, that number's nuts (in a good way). So people were interested in our products but not buying.
That was curious: low search volume with low conversion rates but high customer interest. So Best and Niche decided to investigate. We came up with three different solutions that we pitched to the AO team.
1. Optimize the Website
One reason for poor performance was low ad rank. Being a photography website, the Artisan Obscura site was very image heavy. That's great! But not for the Google bots crawling for relevant search terms. So we created landing pages for every product and organized them by camera model and Artisan Obscura product. That way we'd score higher ad ranks, pay less for ads and provide visitors with a more specific shopping experience.
Unbounce has a great article on long-form, SEO landing pages if you want to read more.
2. Obtain Customer Feedback
Visitors came to the website but didn't buy. Why? Yeah, we could have hypothesized all day. It could have been a pricing issue. It could have been a website navigation issue. It could have been that customers were looking for another product.
But Best & Niche wanted to get to the source.
3. Launch a Refer a Friend Campaign
Artisan Obscura followers are very passionate. Casual photography hobbyists don't drop $40 on a camera shutter button. They like the brand's Instagram posts and there are users who tag Artisan Obscura nearly everyday.
So we decided to leverage that passion with a KingSumo Refer a Friend Campaign. The idea was to give points to users for different methods of sharing. 1 pt for a facebook shout out. 3 pts its for inviting a friend to like us on Instagram. 5 pts for an email. Etc. Etc. This strategy probably wouldn't work for all businesses, but Artisan Obscura seemed like a great fit.
* This project is still ongoing and we hope to get further results soon!
Did this advice help your marketing? Did your test results turn out differently than ours? Let the rest of us know by posting a comment below! Really, I’m curious.
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