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YDesign Group, LLC is a family of online-led retailers that offer lighting, fans, and home furnishings. In 2001, the company launched its flagship brand, YLighting, which offers an expansive, curated collection of modern and contemporary indoor and outdoor lighting. YLighting’s experts can also help customers design sophisticated lighting systems.
YDesign Group sells products to consumers and trade professionals through its YLighting.com, Lumens.com, and YLiving.com websites, as well as through catalogs. Its customers often spend a lot of time researching products and considering design ideas before making a purchase — and many place their orders by phone after calling for pricing and other information. Because of this, the company invests heavily in paid search campaigns to help drive phone orders. However, for years it had very little insight into how those campaigns were performing.
“Many assumptions were made about what keywords we should bid on to drive traffic to our call center,” Jesse Teske, web analytics manager at YDesign Group explained. “But really, we had no idea if those keywords were delivering ROI.”
YDesign Group’s lack of insight into paid search campaign performance was due largely to the fact that it did not have a call tracking and analytics solution. “Even though we’re a lighting company, we were in the dark,” said Teske.
After evaluating different options, YDesign Group chose Invoca’s AI-powered call tracking and analytics solution. A key selling point, said Teske, is Invoca’s native integration with Adobe Experience Cloud. “We use a custom attribution model for our web revenue, and we need to make sure we are giving credit to all the marketing channels that touch the customer journey.”
Invoca integrates with Adobe in two primary ways: attribution for optimization and segmentation for personalization and targeting. By using Invoca and Adobe together, YDesign Group is able to bring new insights to Adobe Analytics. It can look at online conversions as well as phone calls and phone call conversions alongside the marketing channels that are driving those calls. And the company can use that information to adjust its spend in those marketing channels to make sure it’s driving the highest return on ad spend (ROAS) possible.
By the second quarter of 2019, Teske said he was confident to go much deeper with its call tracking and analysis with Invoca. “We let the machine learning models in Google Ads really start to use our Invoca data so we could understand where we needed to tweak our bidding strategy for keywords. And that’s when we started to see the efficiency gains.”
Data insights from Invoca soon made it clear that several of its pricey legacy campaigns for its partner brands were not delivering the desired ROI — by a longshot. “We were bidding to be the first or second search result, and the costs-per-click were some of the highest in our paid search campaigns,” said Teske. “But we discovered that the ad spend wasn’t driving call conversions. Most of the calls we received were for customer service or replacements.”
That revelation prompted significant dialing back of ad spend on such campaigns. “We have seen a year-over-year efficiency gain in ROAS of 37%, on average.”
Teske added, “We’re definitely seeing bottom-line benefits from using Invoca. We’ve stopped spending money on campaigns that aren’t profitable and now channel more money into areas that are working for us. We’ve optimized our bidding strategy so we can target a tighter audience that is more likely to convert.”
While YDesign Group likely would have shut down some of its unprofitable legacy campaigns in time, Teske said the decisions would be based on guesswork if the company wasn’t using the Invoca platform.
Read the full case study to learn more about how YDesign uses Invoca to optimize paid search.
