ZIP Code Targeting Drives Store Visits for Furniture Retailer
The Goal
Hudson’s Furniture is a prominent regional store spread across 12 locations in Central Florida. They specialize in providing a comprehensive range of furniture for every room, from bedrooms to living rooms, including outdoor/patio setups. Their designs offer a multitude of choices, including coastal collections that reflect Florida’s unique style.
Hudson’s Furniture is not just a business; it’s a local brand that actively engages with its community. They offer discounts to medical professionals, police officers, firefighters, EMS technicians, and military veterans, underlining their commitment to giving back.
In October 2022, Hudson’s Furniture approached us with a clear goal: to boost both in-store visits and online revenue. They were struggling to see a return from their geographical targeting strategies and sought new ways to optimize their PPC campaigns.
The Strategy
Objective
Hudson’s Furniture primarily serves consumers located in Central Florida who are in need of new furniture for their homes. To accommodate various budgets, they offer a multitude of sales and provide financing options for their higher-priced items.
Typically, their customer base leans towards an older demographic with disposable income. The preferences of this audience have also changed significantly over the last several years. Many of these consumers now prefer to shop online as opposed to retail stores.
Hudson’s came to us with two goals in mind:
- Getting their customers back in their stores
- Increasing ecommerce revenue
We collaborated with the Hudson’s Furniture team to get internal data on revenue by ZIP code for each store. This data enabled us to align each store’s location targeting with its top-performing ZIP codes.
Execution
We first turned our attention to the geotargeting settings in their Google Ads account, which was configured primarily to drive store visit conversions to each individual location. However, we noticed that many of the campaigns had overlapping geographies, which was likely causing potential customers to be directed to the wrong store based on their location.
This was not only confusing for customers, but also skewed the campaign results, as visits could be misattributed to different store locations.
By using ZIP code targeting, we resolved the overlapping geography, so the ad spend was efficiently targeting each ZIP code surrounding the client’s target area of Central Florida.
We analyzed the performance of each store location and found the top-performing location for each ZIP code that saw sales for Hudson’s in their target area. Then, we used these ZIP codes to rethink the location targeting for our campaigns, allowing us to reach the right audience for each store location, while also removing any overlapping geographies within the campaigns.
Additionally, we conducted testing with bid strategies. Several broader campaigns used a tCPA bid strategy, with some success. We tested removing this target from two of our campaigns and saw our CPA drop by 10 – 20%. This data encouraged us to start slowly removing the tCPA from all of our broader campaigns.
Finally, we reallocated the budget between campaigns to maximize efficiency. We analyzed the performance of each campaign and allocated the budget to the campaigns that were driving the highest return on investment.
With clearer insights on the performance of the individual stores following our geography optimizations, in-store we were able to allocate 20% more of the budget towards our most effective stores in the first two months of 2023. This approach allowed us to achieve stronger results for Hudson’s Furniture with the same overall budget.
The Results
In the first 3 full months of the campaign, we increased the store visit conversion rate by +86%. This resulted in 1,000+ total store visit conversions YoY, a +17% increase. In the meantime, the store visit CPA decreased by -8%.
Once the overlapping geography was resolved, we moved away from the lower-performing ZIP codes. This, in addition to our other efficiency optimizations, allowed us to allocate more spend to the higher-performing campaigns increasing ecommerce revenue from paid search by +43% PoP and +78% YoY.
Through optimizing Hudson’s Furniture’s geography targeting and adjusting campaign strategy, our PPC team was able to meet their goals and exceed their expectations on results in the first 3 months of our partnership.
