Conversion harmony achieved for moebel.de

Connecting the right person to the right product

For a home and living platform, high-quality web traffic is like the perfect coffee table in the perfectly balanced room. It’s the element that ties everything else together and that makes the whole thing work. The trick is knowing where to source it—and Microsoft Advertising provides the solution with a creative approach.

The company’s mission revolves around connecting the right person to the right product through its network of more than 300 retail partners. When those partners can be confident that a high volume of incoming traffic means a high volume of interested customers ready to convert, then the wins stack up for everyone. It’s a case of commercial harmony.

“When we improve traffic quality for our partners, they’re generating more profit per click, which increases the value of traffic from our site,” explains Joris Wigger, moebel.de’s head of Search Engine Advertising (SEA). “There’s a positive spiral that helps us to expand our marketing and our business.”

That spiral multiplies the value of any source of traffic that increases the conversion rate on furniture and furnishings. So when a search platform stands out in this respect, it’s worth paying close attention to what further value it can add.

Where clicks count for more

“Because it’s so strong on the conversion side, the share of Microsoft search within our marketing mix is larger than Microsoft’s share of the search market overall. It’s a measure of how happy we are with the traffic that we’re receiving,” says Joris.

Sales tracking operates on all partner websites for an end-to-end view of the value of search traffic. That tracking consistently shows clicks from Microsoft converting at a rate 20% higher than Google—and it helped persuade Joris and his team to explore how other Microsoft properties could add value for moebel.de’s business. That search led them to the Microsoft Audience Network—and an element that would elevate traffic quality to the next level.

“We had tried using the Microsoft Audience Network as a prospecting tool in the past and struggled to generate the performance that we needed, but the launch of feed-based Shopping Campaigns and dynamic remarketing gave us a reason to take another look,” says Joris. “We were really surprised when we saw just how well it performed, right off the bat.”

An instant hit in the feed

Joris had hoped for a similar double-digit uplift in conversions to that delivered consistently by Microsoft search. Instead, the Microsoft Audience Network delivered a three-fold increase in conversion rate (for the partners) compared to the rest of moebel.de’s display ad budget. So strong has the performance been that Audience Ad campaigns even outperform the company’s search advertising.

“We’d have expected it to perform 20% better than Google, as the search campaigns do, but actually, it’s even better than that,” says Joris. “We’re seeing a performance that’s three times better—and consistently so, over several months. Around 6.5% of our total display ad clicks and 16% of our total sales from display ads now come through the Microsoft Audience Network retail campaigns.”

The best items of furniture often have more than one function—and moebel.de is discovering that the best advertising platforms can play a multi-dimensional role as well. “We’ve got a lot of experience optimizing our shopping feeds, and so activating the Audience Ads campaign in addition to our search engine advertising with Microsoft was fairly simple for us,” says Joris. “We’re very involved with all of the Microsoft Advertising products, and that’s because the quality of the traffic is so high.”