Joybird: Paid Advertising Success From Performance Max Testing

The Goal

Joybird is an e-commerce furniture website best known for its custom mid-century modern furniture. Joybird provides customers the unique opportunity to create original furniture pieces that perfectly fit their space. They sought a digital marketing partner that could help them increase the ROI on their advertising spend.

In 2021, we decided to test Google’s Performance Max, an uncharted new campaign type that was meant to replace Smart Shopping but also act as a supplementary campaign to Search, Display, Discovery, and Youtube. At the time of testing, Performance Max was only in the alpha stage of the product and there was no historical performance data or knowledge base on this platform.

To test, our team had to take an innovative approach to prove the ROI of this new feature against the existing Google Shopping campaigns that Joybird was running. 

The Strategy

Objective

Our strategy in setting up the test was to keep the campaign format as similar as possible to Smart Shopping to get the most accurate results. We created a testing framework that allowed us to accurately assess whether Performance Max could outperform Smart Shopping.

We monitored the campaign on a daily basis and relied heavily on signals such as conversion volume, conversion rate, cost per conversion and other data to determine whether we were seeing positive results.

Execution

Go Fish Digital approached this test with a highly controlled framework by establishing the following criteria:

1. Ensure that the Performance Max shopping products were the same as the Smart Shopping campaign.
2. Match the current audience targets but also take advantage of the expanded audience signals offered.
3. Test new and additional creative, as more headlines, descriptions, images and videos are available in this campaign format.
4. Keep the same bidding strategy as Smart Shopping.
5. Keep the same daily budget as Smart Shopping.
6. Monitor the campaigns daily to ensure no significant drop in performance.
7. Provide weekly updates to the Joybird team.

The Results

Performance Max far exceeded our expectations. At the end of the initial test we saw: 

• 40% higher ROAS 
• 95% lift in revenue
• 52% increase in clicks

Because of this success, Joybird was featured in a Google case study for its impressive performance. Both the Joybird and Go Fish Digital team were also quoted in Furniture Today for their innovation in pay per click strategies.