After using Wave Commerce’s rewards app, S Loyalty, for their ecommerce store, OUT OF STOCK engaged Wave Commerce to develop a strategy for customer discovery in their Hong Kong home market. Wave Commerce helped OUT OF STOCK take advantage of the newly introduced Google Shopping Ads in 2017 for Hong Kong to optimize keyword search results and generate inbound leads to their online store.

The Objective

OUT OF STOCK already had data on which items sold well, but in order to reach new customers in Hong Kong, OUT OF STOCK needed to learn how they were searching and optimize their site to display for both English and Chinese search results. Building on OUT OF STOCK’s existing knowledge of their customer segments, Wave Commerce helped to systematically test the effectiveness of the new Google Shopping Ads format in capturing relevant traffic for their site.

Building a Customer Discovery Channel with Google Shopping Campaigns

Wave Commerce first helped OUT OF STOCK identify how their English-focused online store was being discovered in order to narrow down an ad placement strategy. Wave Commerce also helped OUT OF STOCK discover the most popular furniture-related search terms, which were primarily in Chinese. In Hong Kong, searches in Chinese can also display English websites, so Wave Commerce could identify keywords in English and Chinese to run Google Shopping Ads.

Based on the research provided by Wave Commerce, OUT OF STOCK was able to suggest their most popular items to test based on existing sales data. As Google’s Shopping Ads with photos differ from traditional search ad listings, Wave Commerce worked with OUT OF STOCK to adjust item copywriting to improve their ad display position and maximize the search terms for each item. Shopping Ads factors that affect display position include the following:

• having an appropriate product name and information instead of keyword bidding in traditional search ads
  
• having a larger product catalogue to capture more search terms and generate higher traffic
  

In Hong Kong, search volume for certain furniture terms in Cantonese can be significantly higher than English, so it was important to create Shopping Ads optimized for searches in the Chinese language to attract enough traffic to do further optimization. Merchants should also bear in mind that different Chinese terms for the same item, such as “梳化” and “沙發” for sofa will return different results with regards to search volume.

Results

By building on OUT OF STOCK’s knowledge of customer preferences, Wave Commerce helped an established Hong Kong furniture brand understand their target consumer search patterns and compete with large distributors for front page search results with Google Shopping Ads. OUT OF STOCK gained data points on how listings were performing and learned about their impression and competitive score performance relative to competitors. With the search marketing data to add to their own online sales data, OUT OF STOCK was able to focus on strategic product types to compete with more established brands that dominated results and increase their clickshare.

Ecommerce merchants in Hong Kong should stay informed about the latest tools that platforms, such as Google, are introducing into the market to test early. As Google Shopping Ads was only introduced to Hong Kong in 2017, Google is still developing verticals for products. These new visual listings display at the top of mobile search results, taking majority of screen space, giving ecommerce merchants an opportunity to attract shoppers with images and descriptive titles. We advise merchants to understand how this new tool can help them discover more customers for their ecommerce business before other competitors crowd the market.