When advertising is not the problem
A product where no advertising strategy worked. The cause turned out to be photo content and account history, not the campaigns.
By Alex Tkach, CEO & Co-Founder
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Sometimes the advertising is not what is broken. This was one of those accounts, and the pattern repeats often enough to be worth describing.
The situation
We were given a product to test advertising traffic on. After a test period, and after trying several different approaches and strategies, the results stayed unsatisfactory.
Two things stood out once we looked past the campaigns:
- The photo content was behind the category. Compared with the main competitors in the niche, the images looked faded in their colour scheme and clearly lost the comparison.
- The account history was working against the product. According to the account statistics, numbers had been declining steadily since launch, and the product had gone a long time without advertising.
What we recommended
Rework the photo content, and move the product to a different account.
The seller found the first hard to believe: that photo content could influence sales that strongly. It is a common reaction, and an understandable one, because photography usually feels like a finished decision by the time advertising starts.
What happened
A week after moving the product to a new account and improving the photo content, performance improved, including conversion rate.
The point
Never stop at the obvious explanation. Listing design belongs on the list of things to check, and this is not the only case in our practice where advertising performed poorly because the photo content had never been tested.
A specialist's job is not only to watch the ad account. It is to notice when the ad account is not where the problem lives.