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HMV Uses AutoSegments to Discover Valuable New Google Ads Segment

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Story Behind the Brand

HMV is a British music and entertainment retailer founded in 1921. It is known for its extensive range of products, including music, DVDs, Blu-rays, video games, and other entertainment items. As a legacy brand that’s seen multiple phases of fandom and music consumption, HMV continues to thrive because of its engaging, omnichannel customer experience and community-first approach.

34
%
increase in impressions
425
%
increase in landing page views
14
%
revenue lift

Challenge

Like many other ecommerce brands, HMV runs pay per click (PPC) campaigns to acquire customers and drive revenue. 

The company runs both prospecting and acquisition campaigns across a range of ad networks and formats, such as Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, and more. Its biggest PPC campaign is a performance max (PMax) campaign, a newer type of advertising campaign offered by Google Ads. Google uses machine learning to automatically optimize ads across multiple Google properties, including Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. 

HMV consistently runs PMax campaigns as an evergreen, very top-of-funnel method to drive traffic to its website. Because this proves to be such a critical starting point for paid media impressions, HMV spends a significant portion of its marketing budget on its PMax campaigns. 

The challenge HMV faced with these campaigns was optimizing and maximizing them for peak impact. Even small, incremental improvements in impressions, clicks, or conversion rates could yield significant cost savings or a large amount of new revenue. 

While Google does automate much of the campaign process, it does require regular input from marketers for maximum optimization. This includes work done on creative assets, bidding and budget, or conversion goals. 

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Solution

The AutoSegments feature of Bloomreach Engagement powered by Loomi AI proved to be the most effective way for HMV to optimize its PMAX campaigns. 

AutoSegments helps marketers uncover hidden opportunities for optimization and revenue. Marketers need to tell Loomi AI “what to look for” by entering customer properties, like favorite category, customer gender, and metrics like email click through rate, into a visual interface. Loomi AI then finds segments composed of these properties and metrics. 

HMV had previously used a variety of methods to create PMax audiences to target, including the Bloomreach Engagement platform. Marketers can use Bloomreach Engagement to create segments and “pass” them onto Google via Engagement’s ad-tech integration. This integration passes on a list of customers from Bloomreach to Google, which then uses machine learning algorithms to find lookalike customers.  

With the introduction of AutoSegments, HMV saw an opportunity to improve the targeting of PMax campaigns and drive more conversions. Thanks to Loomi AI, HMV could use AutoSegments to find an incredibly valuable sub-segment, pass it onto Google, and change its audience targeting to boost conversions. 

For more on how HMV used AutoSegments to discover and build a new segment, check out our blog post from HMV’s Connor Weir.  

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AutoSegments were exactly the kind of ‘nextgen’ tool that let us take our tons of customer data and translate it into useful, actionable insights to get a leg up on our competition.

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Connor Weir

Community Marketing Manager, HMV

Results

Loomi AI immediately helped HMV improve campaign performance across the board as the AutoSegments feature increased the click-through rate of ads by 0.1% and the conversion rate of ads by 0.12%. 

That translated into a significant increase in campaign outcomes week over week as HMV saw a 34% increase in impressions, 425% increase in landing page views, and a 14% revenue increase after deploying the AutoSegments feature. 

Diving deeper, HMV saw a 111% increase in impressions and 121% increase in conversions within strategically key campaigns. 

The AutoSegments feature was so successful without any additional intervention because Google has a tendency to look for customers in the same places. The particular segment that Loomi AI found is a great example of one that Google had not already targeted, a profitable segment for HMV.

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