Google wanted to encourage shoppers in South East Asia to use its shopping and search functions to find the best deals on the things they want to buy. The brand targeted online shoppers and those who research online but buy in-store. Personalized messages were run across digital media to promote Google as an important shopping partner.
Objective and Context:
Due to intense e-commerce competition, online consumers have often expressed how overwhelmed they feel with the high number of places they can find deals. Research shows that they feel frustrated and sometimes even depressed when they realized that there was a better deal on a product they already purchased.
As a brand, Google's objective is to organize the world's information in an easy and accessible manner. This includes information about shopping online. With thousands of deals in one place, Google wanted to increase daily usage of Google Shopping and educate Indonesians on the fact that Google Search is the easiest way to make shopping decisions.
Campaign KPIs included:
A notable challenge was that the brand was competing in a category saturated by super apps optimized to send shoppers down a rabbit hole of never ending offers and deals. The audience had their own ways of using multiple shopping apps to filter and find their version of the best deal. Google wanted them to trust in its superior shopping search experience and lean on it to help streamline their purchases.
Target Audience:
The primary target audience for the campaign was comprised of South East Asian (SEA) e-commerce shoppers between the ages 25 and 44 years old. The secondary target was South East Asian shoppers between the ages 35 and 55 who prefer to research online and purchase offline.
Creative Strategy:
Research revealed that the SEA e-commerce customers were largely impulse shoppers. They get easily influenced by friends and family members in regard to products and services. Most of the time, their urgency to own the product or service more often than not resulted in them being swayed by the first deal they see, thus missing out on the best deal.
The brand would create a campaign that would increase shopping research before a purchase. By doing so, Google would grow daily usage of its products. The creative strategy was to intercept moments of impulsiveness to demonstrate how shopping is made easier by Google.
Overall Campaign Execution:
When crafting the campaign, Google saw the need to slightly nuance the messaging across the primary and secondary target audiences. For online shoppers, Google sought to ease their pain and the effort required to find a good deal by positioning Google Search Shopping a helpful way to avoid the many steps involved. For offline shoppers, Google sought to help them avoid settling for a new deal or item they just found by checking Google before buying it offline. The brand also wanted to create a sense of missing out on the best deals if these shoppers didn't reference what else was available on Google first.
Google leveraged data so its message could be contextual within many micro-moments in the lives of shoppers; The company found the moments where its target would need shopping information most. These insights informed the media strategy and determined the right channels and times of day for the ads.
Mobile Execution:
Google created a series of ads based on fashion, beauty, personal care, electronics, and cooking equipment shopping verticals. It used geo-fencing to target mall shoppers using a beta "Holiday Shopper" segment recently introduced by Google Analytics.
On Instagram, Google placed itself in all the key moments of shopping temptation. Whenever people searched for their impulses, Google was there in the form of relevant and contextual banners customized to the audience's contextual needs for relevancy and engagement.
This was the first time Google was actively building a presence across e-commerce consumers of the region, and the brand had the uphill task of convincing consumers to make Google a part of their shopping journey.
Google's first objective was to achieve 1 million new daily active users on Google Shopping Search across Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. As a result of the campaign, the brand achieved 2.8 million new daily active users on Google shopping search across Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
For its second objective, the brand set out to achieve a 50 percent increase in shopping queries. The campaign helped Google achieve a 170 percent increase in shopping queries.
