Exclusive Q&A: Mattress Firm regionally customizes Google search ads

The nation’s largest mattress retailer is tailoring ads that appear in Google search results by local factors, such as product availability.

Chain Store Age recently spoke with Ramin Eivaz, chief marketing officer of Mattress Firm, about how the retailer partnered with Google to revamp its digital advertising strategy in the face of COVID-19. Using geographically-tailored search ads, Mattress Firm achieved substantial improvements in several key e-commerce metrics.

What advertising challenges was Mattress Firm facing?
Earlier this year, we didn’t know how long or how challenging the pandemic would be for our business. We knew we needed to accelerate our transformation – and as a result, our advertising – to a more data-driven approach. We also saw vastly different impacts the pandemic was having geographically across the country. 

For example, Houston was not experiencing the same COVID-19 impacts as New York City, so while we were executing a broader national strategy, we also started localizing plans and tactics to maximize opportunities.
 
Why did you partner with Google, and what solutions/services did you use?
As we began to see the geographic differences from the pandemic unfold, we turned to Google to help us implement a locally led, nationally supported advertising strategy. We began customizing campaigns for different markets depending on how they were impacted by the pandemic. 

By optimizing local inventory ads, we showcased our products and store information to nearby shoppers searching with Google. This continued to drive omnichannel sales in regions where stores were open. 
 
Google built us a dashboard to help us see, in real-time, how our ads were performing. This allowed us to adapt to changing consumer demands hour-by-hour and even down to the minute.
 
Lastly, as we expanded our omni-signals, we switched to a 100% automated bid strategy that helped grow our advertising spend through advanced machine learning that monitored the campaign performance and automatically set a bid in every auction to help us achieve our goals.
 
What were the results of the Google advertising collaboration?
The Google dashboard allowed us to get laser-focused with our targeting to maximize ad spend at the right time. By aligning on spend during peak ad engagement times, we started seeing double-digit growth. Within six weeks, we increased our e-commerce revenue by four times, breaking every single e-commerce sales record and more than quadrupling our performance. In a matter of months, we accelerated our digital transformation, which was something we had hoped to achieve in two years.

Are there any future plans you can discuss?
Looking ahead, we’ll continue to stay agile and maintain our e-commerce growth by evolving our omni-platform and remaining a customer-centric retailer. Our focus will be to preserve speed and agility, while leveraging the freedom to discover and grow that we’ve gained from the success of this accelerated growth.