Promotion goals
- Drive traffic to retail chain stores.
- Achieve positive ROMI.
- Reach more than 3 million users.
Mechanics
The team launched two campaigns on the VK Ads platform.
First campaign: reach-focused
The team promoted the Chitai-Gorod website, optimizing the campaign for impressions. They created four ad sets targeting distinct audiences:
- Women aged 18 to 50.
- Women aged 18 to 40 interested in books.
- Men and women aged 18 to 50 subscribed to Chitai-Gorod’s VKontakte community.
- Men and women aged 18 to 50 who made book-related queries (excluding queries with “sell” and “free”) within the last 14 days.
The campaign used AI-generated cartoon-style creatives. This distinctive visual style cuts through banner blindness effectively. The creatives achieved the highest CTR and drove the most cost-effective website visits at just RUB 30–32.
Second campaign: Mini App
The team promoted a Chitai-Gorod discount offer through a VKontakte mini app where users could join the promotion and receive discount barcodes. This approach leveraged a behavioral insight: people are more likely to redeem barcodes when they are easily accessible, like in social media direct messages.
For this campaign, the team built a chatbot using the Senler service that delivered discount barcodes directly to VKontakte users. Customers could then show these barcodes at offline stores to receive purchase discounts. The second campaign was optimized specifically for mini app launches.
Three ad sets targeted different audience segments:
- Men and women aged 18 to 50 subscribed to Chitai-Gorod’s VKontakte community.
- Women aged 25 to 50 who made book-related queries (excluding queries with “sell” and “free”) within the last 14 days.
- Women aged 18 to 50 subscribed to book communities on VKontakte.
Both campaigns targeted users across 187 cities where Chitai-Gorod operates stores. Daily budget caps and ad set-level optimization allowed the team to pause underperforming sets and shift the budget toward top performers.
Creatives featuring a smiling girl with a book generated the strongest results, achieving 67% CTR and newsletter subscription costs under RUB 60.
Results
The Chitai-Gorod campaign reached over 4 million users – exceeding the original target by 1 million.
The reach campaign saw its best performance from ads targeting women interested in books. The mini app campaign performed strongest with Chitai-Gorod's community subscribers.
Offline store purchases using barcodes generated a 583.81% ROMI. This strong profitability stemmed from the chatbot delivery system, which proved highly convenient for users. No need to save barcodes to their devices or take extra steps – users simply opened their VKontakte chat. This kept discounts readily available, even for impulse purchases.
The barcode system also solved a common challenge: measuring how online advertising drives offline sales.
Alexander Ivanov, Performance Manager at Advertalyze:
“A major campaign benefit was building a contact database through our newsletter subscriptions. We can reach this audience anytime at no cost and reactivate them instantly – sending new barcodes, for instance. This significantly boosts campaign profitability while keeping customers updated on current promotions.”
Source: Adindex.ru