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.
Story Behind the Brand
34
%
increase in impressions
425
%
increase in landing page views
14
%
campaign revenue lift week over week
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
To optimize PMAX campaigns with the precision and consistency required to make a real impact, hmv leveraged Bloomreach’s AutoSegments powered by Loomi AI.
AutoSegments is a powerful AI agent designed to uncover customer segmentation opportunities that refine campaigns and drive revenue. Marketers just need to tell AutoSegments “what to look for” by entering customer properties — like favorite category, customer gender, and metrics like email click-through rate — into a visual interface. With these directives, AutoSegments can autonomously find segments composed of these properties and metrics.
hmv had previously used a variety of methods to create PMAX audiences to target, including workflows in the Bloomreach platform. Marketers can use Bloomreach to create segments and “pass” them onto Google via Bloomreach’s ad-tech integration. Once the list of customers is transferred from Bloomreach to Google, machine-learning algorithms can use it to find lookalike customers.
With the introduction of AutoSegments, hmv saw an opportunity to improve the targeting of PMAX campaigns and drive more conversions. AutoSegments can independently create and optimize segments in real time, proactively working to analyze customer data to find incredibly valuable sub-segments, pass them 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.
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.
Connor Weir
Community Marketing Manager, HMV
Results
AutoSegments immediately helped hmv improve PMAX campaign performance across the board, which translated into a significant increase in campaign outcomes week over week: The brand saw a 14% lift in campaign revenue, a 34% increase in impressions, and a 425% increase in landing page views after deploying AutoSegments.
Plus, this success didn’t require additional effort — it saved hmv’s team time while boosting results. hmv identified key customer properties and metrics to target, and AutoSegments took care of the rest, automatically generating hundreds of segments for Google to use as blueprints for campaigns.
By doing away with rule-based segmentation for the real-time optimization that AutoSegments provides, hmv can now target customers that Google often misses.
It found audiences that weren’t likely to convert and should be avoided, identified potential customers that hadn’t been previously targeted, and even uncovered the brand’s most valuable audience, which had a revenue per visitor of £104.11— over 2,800% higher than the global average.
With agentic AI handling the creation and execution of these segments, hmv can optimize campaigns while freeing up its team to focus on strategic growth initiatives, maximizing both efficiency and impact.
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