Vivastreet's AdWords conversions jumped after upgrading to enhanced campaigns

Founded in 2004, Vivastreet is the fourth largest free classified ads website in the world. The company's aim is to create a useful and user-friendly service connecting individuals, businesses and communities to one another, whether in their local area or across the globe. Vivastreet is a market leader in France, Italy, Belgium and Latin America, and a strong challenger in the UK where the goal is to reach the number-one position.

Vivastreet began using Google AdWords in 2008. The marketing mix also includes display, retargeting, social media, affiliates, video, press and TV. The company has a mobile site and app, but had not advertised on mobile before this year.

A focus on the moments that matter

With smartphone uptake continuing to grow, Vivastreet's popular categories — such as property, buy and sell, jobs, services and cars — are likely to be used when its audience is on the go. Consequently, the need to reach consumers at key moments across devices is a growing priority for Vivastreet's marketing team. The company took the launch of AdWords enhanced campaigns as an opportunity to start mobile advertising.

Enhanced campaigns are designed for today's multi-screen world, offering the ability to manage bids across devices, locations and times of day, all from a single, scalable campaign. By setting multiple bid adjustments to target what's most important to your business, AdWords automatically determines the best ad to appear. This helps businesses reach their most valuable customers and connect with them anytime, anywhere and from any device.

Adjusting bids to target mobile

Vivastreet's head of business development Constantin Aubree endeavoured to efficiently target prospective customers searching on smartphones. His goals for mobile devices included increasing conversions, boosting page views and site traffic, and generating email or phone replies to ads.

"If you want to increase visibility on a mobile device," he reasons, "you must appear on the two first positions in the search results for mobile." So using enhanced campaigns, Constantin adjusted the bid for mobile devices on all campaigns to +25%. He used the automated upgrading tools in the AdWords interface, and within a week had migrated 100% of Vivastreet's campaigns on the French market. Although enhanced campaigns provide the option to adjust bids according to additional contexts, such as location and time of day, he decided to measure the performance of the initial bid adjustment first before modifying further parameters.

Reaping the benefits of enhanced campaigns

Vivastreet measures conversions by importing them from Google Analytics into AdWords, so traffic and conversions can be split according to device. This made it easy to see that with the +25% CPC bid multiplier in place, Vivastreet's performance far exceeded expectations. "We were very surprised by the potential of traffic and conversions generated on mobile through enhanced campaigns. And all of this within our target CPA."

Since starting to advertise on mobile, Vivastreet's ads have appeared above the fold and performance has shown constant improvement. In only the third week of targeting mobile users, the company had already doubled the conversions of the first week, while managing to decrease CPA by up to 30% in some categories such as real estate and jobs. Four weeks after migration, total conversions had increased by 34%. Significantly, the overall CPA remained stable.

These compelling numbers tell only half the story though. Constantin says the ease with which he can target both mobile users and desktop users from one campaign is a huge help. "It is definitely more efficient since it enables us to optimize bids at once across all devices."