The Prague marketing agency Unikum administers the accounts of the branded footwear seller Footshop in Mergado. This store does not only advertise on the Slovak and Czech markets, but you can find it in Germany, France, Hungary or Romania. What is their strategy for conquering a new market and how does Mergado help them?
How to expand to Romania with your e‑shop by Unikum
Information phase — analysis
Jana Dzuričková, Inbound Team Leader at Unikum, shared with us her experience of joining the Romanian market. “When entering the comparison engines on any market, we always begin with the information analysis that we perform about 1 month before the start of the given language mutation. On tasks like that, we always work with a colleague from the Footshop Customer Care department of the given state. The aim of the analysis is to find out what types of comparison engines are present in the country and what are the conditions for advertising,” explains Jana.
Before joining the new market, Unikum determines the following areas:
- monthly attendance of the comparison engine
- overview of competition
- the structure of the engine in the different areas — if it is not a pure fashion comparison engine, Unikum determines the share of total visits and sales achieved by fashion and clothing
- product feed specification
- category tree in .xls or XML format
- the format of the engine’s financial cover — credit recharging or reverse billing (important for cash-flow planning in the given state)
- account closing options (immediately, or notice period, additional penalties, fees, etc.)
- bidding format — through administration or through feed, category level, or product level
- CPC — minimum, maximum, average
- other options offered by the engine — basket, campaign display, store of the month, etc.
On the basis of the analysis made by Unikum, they choose which of the suitable comparison engines is going to be the first to run. In the case of Romania, the order was: GLAMI.ro, Compari.ro, Shopmania.ro.
Preparatory phase
“Based on the outputs from the information analysis, we then prepare the TODO list of activities that we need to perform to advertise on the given comparison engine. The list helps us to keep control and track of the individual activities we need to perform. It is advisable if more departments work on the foundation, for us it is marketing, IT and finance departments,” describes Jana their process of preparation.
In Romania, Unikum has joined the search engine GLAMI first. The GLAMI product XML feed was developed in cooperation with Mergado. For Footshop, Unikum uses the universal XML feed format created by the Mergado specification. “We created new export in Mergado, removed/added the necessary elements and created/imported the necessary segments and rules. Categorizing products into the engine’s categories is the most demanding part. If we use GLAMI in other countries, the categorization is relatively fast. Except for language, the category varies just a little,” adds Jana.
For this client, Unikum has taken care of the complex establishment and management of comparison engines that included:
- creating a complex account — profile completion, billing settings, feed insertion, etc.
- linking to Google Analytics and deploying GLAMI piXel over GTM (in the case of GLAMI)
- bidding settings — within category-level administration, within a product-level feed
Optimization phase
The optimization phase is a long-term process in which Unikum works with bidding strategies according to the stage in which the store is positioned on the search engine. Depending on their performance, they determine which products they launch and hide.
“In the first phase, of course, we were trying to get the best visibility, so we worked with the higher CPC than we are currently working with, even at the expense of not very favorable PNO,” Jana evaluates the beginning of the campaign. During this phase, however, Unikum was struggling with technical problems — the problem arose when sending data from the database, which led to a complete suspension of the account. The detection and removal of the problem took about a month in cooperation with the Mergado developers. As a result, the growth phase reached two months from the originally planned one month.
“In the first phase, November’s Black Friday campaign helped us a lot. It kicked our account and started making the first conversions. The Christmas season helped to further growth. Thanks to this, we were able to take a second phase in the new year, aiming to achieve a 25% PNO. During the second phase, we, in cooperation with GLAMI, supported a number of activities that helped get us to the target PNO. We have edited the feeds’ content and the bidding strategy like we always do — with Mergado,” explains the beginnings at the Romanian GLAMI.
In the third phase, Unikum focuses on maintaining the target PNO and strives for maximum account efficiency. In addition to tracking overall performance and the market’s mood, they also do not forget about regular communication with the purchasing and marketing department. So they have current information about newly stocked products or products that are in stock surplus and need help to be sold.
For Footshop, Romania’s comparison engines make 8% share of total revenue today. From current search engines, GLAMI has 90% share, Shopmania 8%, and Compari 2%. Percentages in the budgets of each comparison engine are similar. The last-click PNO of the engines is successfully maintained at a level of 20% for a long time. For GLAMI, PNO is slightly above 23%.
