The Impact of Awareness Ads on Brand Development and Website Traffic

About the Client and Media Advertising

MAUDAU is a marketplace for essential items, featuring over 100,000 products. The assortment, along with prices and promotions, is a key differentiating point for this business. The company has been around for three years, and we have been working on brand development since the summer of 2022.

We use media advertising because it creates demand, builds brand awareness, and product knowledge. All of this indirectly impacts sales: the more awareness, the higher the CTR and conversion rate; the higher the CTR and conversion rate, the lower the customer acquisition cost. Thus, media advertising supports sales, even if it does not directly generate them.

2023 was a year of experiments for MAUDAU, with the company launching various flights, including six on YouTube, which were managed by the newage. agency. Throughout this year, the client’s website traffic correlated with the launch of media campaigns.

​“At the same time, the advertising had a cumulative effect. Launching an ad for a month and disappearing for a quarter is not an option; media campaigns need to be consistent to achieve the desired result,” ​emphasised Olga Rumyantseva, chief marketing officer of MAUDAU​.

Media Advertising Test in 2024

For e-commerce, January is a slow period. Post-holiday demand drops, website traffic decreases, and overall turnover is not as usual. Therefore, the client decided to optimise the advertising budget for this time and redirect funds from media advertising to more conversion-focused traffic channels. As a result, branded search ad traffic fell by 20%, and direct traffic dropped by a quarter. This comparison is against planned metrics, not the high season in November-December.

This decline after cutting back on media prompted MAUDAU to calculate how media advertising impacts other traffic sources. They examined the 2023 flights, excluding Black Friday and the New Year, as high season indicators could distort the overall picture. Retrospectively, they looked at how sales and traffic in free channels (direct, organic) and branded PPC changed during periods with and without media advertising.

During the period when media advertising was active, direct traffic increased by 24% and PPC brand traffic increased by 32%. Organic traffic also grew during the media campaign period, although the client used other specific tools; its growth was less due to media advertising.

Having obtained these results, the client launched a new media campaign in February, resulting in an increase in branded and direct traffic; the decline in SEO relative to planned indicators also decreased (though other factors influenced this as well). This positive trend was also observed in sales.

​However, the main task of media advertising, increasing brand awareness, was most noticeable in the brand lifts that the client launched along with the flights. Throughout 2023, brand awareness among those who had not seen the current campaign gradually increased, but after a pause in advertising in January, it dropped by 6%. The only previous decline was in November 2023, when the market was oversaturated with information due to Black Friday, and even then, the decline was only 2%. In January 2024, the client lost 6% of brand awareness, which was very painful.

​Yet, after the February flight, awareness began to recover, reaching 41.3%. All of this confirms and vividly illustrates the necessity of media campaigns.

​“If you launch media campaigns, analyse how they affect your free traffic channels. Don’t repeat the mistake of cutting back on media only to invest even more later. Essentially, to work effectively, media advertising has its own specifics, and it’s very important to work with great partners and experts,” ​concluded Olga Rumyantseva CMO MAUDAU.

How Did We Achieve That

Achieving such remarkable results was possible due to our approach to planning, launching, and optimising media campaigns. When you can track the effectiveness of each ad and its impact on each user, running a campaign becomes somewhat more complex. In digital, it’s possible to collect data online, analyse it, and make and implement decisions on the same day, significantly expanding possibilities. This involves a large amount of information; for MAUDAU alone, we analyse over a terabyte of data per day. Of course, this is not done manually but with dashboards and big data tools.

Planning becomes dynamic, allowing segmentation of viewers not into two audiences but into a hundred and two. Under these conditions, the primary work of a digital agency occurs not even at the planning and launch stage, but directly during the campaign. In media advertising for large brands, each day can cost hundreds of thousands of hryvnias, so optimization, even by a few percent, has a significant impact every day.

The question remains how to create such an analytical system. Here, we use post-view and cross-device analysis. In digital, it’s possible to track the user’s journey from the first ad impression to the sale, even if they did not click on the ad. For this, we use Google’s tracking system, Campaign Manager. It allows us to mark the user at the moment the ad is shown and later identify when they visited the advertiser’s website and what they did there.

​​​“Those who analyse media advertising by clicks, don’t do it. Look at reach and cost per reach, but do not analyse by clicks, as this leads to incorrect conclusions,” emphasised newage. founder Oleksiy Lyakh.

Comprehensive Analysis

Using Campaign Manager, we can identify among all the site visitors those who saw a specific ad (even if they didn’t click on it). Accordingly, we can compare the behaviour of this cohort with the behaviour of the rest of the visitors who did not see the ad.

This is a kind of technometric brand lift that shows the impact of media advertising on consumer decision-making. In the case of MAUDAU, the difference between the two cohorts was record-breaking—the ad audience made 238% more conversions on average across all channels.

Optimization

We use all the data we collect to optimise advertising on many parameters. Let’s consider three cases where real-time analytics helped improve the campaign. Note that we work to some extent on all aspects simultaneously for each flight, but for the case study, we chose the most illustrative examples of how collected data led to timely conclusions and significantly improved results.

Frequency

Different sources provide different numbers of impressions that can be considered effective. Some say 3-4, others 5-6, and for a launch, they may recommend 8-9 impressions. This all makes no sense. Effective frequency for each campaign is what the campaign’s analytics show. Indeed, as brand awareness grows, the effective frequency decreases, but seasonality, for example, also influences it.

For example, during Black Friday, we planned a campaign with a frequency of 5-6, based on previous flights, but the audience was more ready to buy, so an effective frequency was 3-4 impressions. Thanks to dashboards and automated analytics, we quickly noticed this and redirected budgets from the number of impressions per viewer to audience expansion. This allowed us to attract more conversions with the same campaign budget.

Ads Cost

Mostly, the client aims to reduce the contact cost, which they communicate to the agency. This is a normal goal when there is a “reach” metric. Let’s consider working with cost using the example of a New Year campaign. All auctions are overheated, competition is high, and in the “household chemicals” category, we couldn’t reach our audience because the auction price was too high. Planners suggested raising the price by 40-50%, so we took more expensive contacts with media advertising but still reached the target audience we needed.

Observing the cohort of users who saw the media ad, we noticed that it showed a great conversion rate (including through performance tools), so this overpayment for impressions was justified. Without fast analytics, we wouldn’t have seen the impact of raising the price immediately and might have missed this effective decision. And without Comprehensive Analysis, we would have searched for a connection between the achieved audience and conversions blindly, not understanding the real role of media advertising in the overall picture.

Tests and Experiments

It’s important to test new approaches and tools, even if the old ones work satisfactorily. We had long worked with advertising through a Google Ads account but still convinced the client to test another Google advertising tool—Display & Video 360.

DV360 has more detailed audience breakdowns and more powerful campaign optimization capabilities, including the ability to account for perception signals users made on the path to conversion. We launched an ad in DV360 for the same audience we would have chosen in Google Ads, and the campaign was more effective. As a result, we gained additional reach of over 2 million users due to frequency limitation and testing custom strategies for higher conversion rates.

I will emphasise that the effectiveness indicators here are not clicks and conversions from them, but rather a deeper indicator of delayed conversions, which allows analysing how the media campaign helps other channels lead the user to conversion.

Conclusion

There are a lot of numbers and data in digital. This data can and should be used, and the most important thing is to process the data in a timely manner. Quick response is effective optimization. In digital, a lot can be done post-campaign, but with the current budgets, optimization can be done online during ongoing campaigns. A lot of information is needed and should be collected quickly so that specialists can better understand the campaign and respond promptly to any changes.