Performance Max

Watsons Ukraine is a chain of cosmetics and household goods stores. It now runs 429 offline stores in more than 100 Ukrainian cities, serving almost 3 million shoppers a month. iplace has worked with Watsons since 2016: for more than five years one of the country's largest cosmetics chains has trusted our team with promoting its products.

But competition in beauty and health e-commerce keeps growing, and new companies, brands and products appear on the Ukrainian market all the time. Reaching the sales volumes you want gets harder every year. Unless you work with iplace. ;)

Watsons set us a task: more transactions and higher sales while keeping the return on ad spend where they wanted it. Spoiler: we managed it. We found an effective tool — automated Performance Max campaigns.

Over five years of working with Watsons we have tested a great many conversion tools. So when a new one called Performance Max appeared in beta from the Google team in June 2021, we got access straight away and started testing.

Worth noting: testing a new tool meant filing a request that takes several weeks to review. Because iplace has Premium support from the Google team, we got beta access sooner.

Performance Max, the new unified campaign type, uses the best of automation to optimise towards a single business goal and brings together every effective Google inventory platform:

• YouTube,
• Discovery,
• the Display Network,
• Google Maps,
• Gmail,
• Search (including search partners),
• and more than 3 million websites and apps.

The tool let us:

• run display and search advertising at the same time,
• save the time it takes to build a separate campaign for every placement,
• show the message to exactly the audience that wants to buy Watsons products.

Launching Performance Max campaigns allowed us to:

• grow the number of transactions by 14%,
• cut the cost per transaction by 30%,
• grow ROAS by 40%,
• grow site visits by 7%,
• cut the cost per click by 25%,
• and reduce ad spend by 20% at the same time.

Performance Max delivered excellent results and we were pleased with it. The tool has since left beta, and we now use it as one of the main ways we promote Watsons products.

Performance Max will not replace search campaigns, but it can work alongside them and improve the shared result.