Introduction
Volef is a Belgian-based e-commerce company that serves the B2C market with Luxury For Men and the B2B market with Exclusive Business Gifts. Even though these seasoned entrepreneurs already had experience with online advertising, in spring 2022 they enlisted our help.
“There are not many of us at Volef,” says Dries Boven, founder and CEO, “and in spring 2022, I came to the conclusion that we no longer had enough time to set up and manage ad campaigns in Google Ads ourselves. However, we knew very well how important these are. Expertise in Google Ads was a must, and they had to be able to switch very quickly. There's a good reason why there are no slow e-commerce companies.”
Our approach
We immediately set to work to prove that we were worthy of Volef's trust. First, we removed Volef from Google Shopping CSS (Comparison Shopping Service), because Google rather greedily skims e-commerce companies' sales as CSS partners. Then, we optimized categorizations and keywords, so that the ads would have a wider reach.
We designed Responsive Search Ads for Volef (where Google itself matches headlines and texts and learns what works best) in combination with a Performance Max setup, which adjusts and tests ads semi-autonomously across the entire Google services network (e.g. YouTube, Gmail and Maps).
Next up was paid social. Here, too, we acted mainly as an optimization partner since there was already a lot of expertise at Volef itself. The Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram) became the main focus, but there were also experiments with LinkedIn. The pace was high but we possessed enough agility to respond quickly to Volef's questions and requirements. On social media, the focus was mainly on the high-end segment. For Facebook, we used Instant Experiences (a type of landing page where the user stays within the social medium but can convert immediately).
As a final point, we also set the goals of the campaigns to focus both on volume (customers who buy a lot or frequently) and value (the margin on one major purchase can be higher than that of 50 smaller ones).
Conclusion
The results are impressive. Volef again achieved a return on ad spend (ROAS) of 358% by the end of 2023. Even on social media, which traditionally does not score as strongly as Google as a source for e-commerce, the results in many cases ended up above the set target. Instant Experiences were the deciding factor here.
“These great numbers tell their own story and show that MakeWaves really is the expert in performance marketing. In particular, MakeWaves’ responsiveness impressed me. You don't often come across that combination of knowledge and speed.”
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