Munson Guitars reaches new customers with smart campaigns

Achieves 80% drop in cost per acquisition

Crafting premium custom guitars

As a custom guitar manufacturer in Britain, Munson Guitars combines traditional craftsmanship with the latest technology to build the dream guitars of guitarists across the US, UK, and various countries in Europe. From playing style and shape, to tone and finishing, customers can tell Munson what they want, and they make the guitar exactly as desired.

As a small business, Munson Guitars continues to look for innovative and efficient ways of reaching new guitar players and aspiring musicians. Owner Carl Munson worked as a pay-per-click (PPC) specialist before establishing his custom guitar shop and knew the importance of driving traffic to Munson Guitars’ website to build brand awareness and increase conversions.

But as a small business owner, Munson didn’t have the time to manage complex advertising efforts nor the budget to bring on an agency. “Having done PPC in a previous life, I know that the output is proportionate to how much time you put in, and I didn’t have that time,” he said.

Our business is ultimately about serving customers and making them guitars, not investing a huge amount of time to get website visitors to convert into customers. Smart campaigns enables us to do that.

Carl Munson, Owner, Munson Guitars

A smarter way to advertise

Despite time constraints, Munson still wanted the exposure to paid search and qualified traffic with good leads. He decided to leverage the tools, rich insights and analytics of Microsoft Advertising to help save time and make better decisions. To achieve that, he turned to the newly launched smart campaigns from Microsoft Advertising.

Smart campaigns use Microsoft’s artificial intelligence technology to create and manage advertising campaigns for small businesses. The system helps set up multiple ads with minimal work — doing the heavy lifting for small business owners. The simplicity of smart campaigns allows for easy advertising on the Microsoft Search Network.

Setting up smart campaigns for Munson Guitars didn’t require much effort, with Munson plugging in the necessary details and the Microsoft Advertising platform doing the rest. He didn’t have to do keyword research in the beginning or manage the campaign until the end. Another benefit for Munson was the level of insights the platform provided along with seeing campaign details at a glance.

Smart campaigns deliver music to the register

With smart campaigns, the British custom guitar maker achieved an 80% drop in cost per acquisition after 90 days. Traffic also increased for the Munson Guitars website, with smart campaigns making up 63% of the business’s total website traffic, and 6% of that traffic converting to filling out forms. This positive performance would not have been possible without the minimum effort yet maximum results that Microsoft Advertising’s smart campaigns offer small businesses.

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