how much you need to invest in advertising to make normal sales on Wildberries

Hello, my name is Oleg Nevorotov. In professional chats, I often come across the opinion that advertising and SEO optimization on Wildberries is just a waste of money. But I myself am an active seller with seven years of experience, and my experience suggests otherwise.

I want to share a case and tell you how we promoted Christmas decorations before the New Year with the help of SEO and advertising, and what results a clear strategy helped to achieve.

Product first

At the end of autumn 2022, we promoted Christmas decoration sets. This is a seasonal product with a high margin of 39-41%, and the demand before the New Year is huge. It may seem that this is the secret of success. But the situation is always complicated by a lot of competition on the marketplace. Before the New Year, all sellers advertise their products, and promotion becomes more expensive.

Let me explain why: advertising on Wildberries works on the principle of an auction. The more products in one category are advertised, the higher the ad impression bid goes up. Therefore, the advertising budget is growing and there is a risk of spending money, but not selling anything.

*We promoted such sets of Christmas decorations on the marketplace*

How the promotion was launched

Here’s what you had to do in order to successfully sell products on Wildberries:

Optimize product cardsthat were already in the store from last year. Algorithms for internal SEO optimization and ranking have changed, so we have updated the names and descriptions of products. We also checked that all additional fields were filled in correctly.
Run ads in search results. This is necessary to promote the product for the selected keywords and enhance SEO optimization. By default, in the seller’s advertising account, you can select a product for advertising, and the marketplace itself will pull up the keywords from the card. But there is a risk that they will not be relevant to the product. One of such examples is the key “Christmas tree 18+”, this is not about our product at all. Therefore, we manually excluded phrases for which there should not be impressions, and fixed those that we needed.

We did all this in parallel. If you just add keywords to the product card, they will be indexed and the card will rise higher in the search, but this will take a lot of time.

Promotion helps you get indexed faster by keywords and get into the desired top: you select queries, launch ads, and the product appears in the first places in the search for these queries.

We share the scheme of promotion by months.

October

Expanded card titles to 100 characters and added near-target queries to the description. Additionally, we “glued” the cards – combined 9 different cards into one. Here’s what it gave:

If the buyer opened one of our products, he immediately saw the rest inside – this expanded his choice, and increased the likelihood of a sale to us.
Reviews from all cards were combined into a common block. As a result, there are more of them, which increases the confidence of buyers.

This is how the gluing of cards looks like - you can see different products in the assortment, and you can read reviews about everything at once — *This is how the gluing of cards looks like – you can see different products in the assortment, and you can read reviews about everything at once*

At the end of October, namely on the 21st, we launched advertising in the search for low-frequency queries in 1-3 places. For management, we used a bidder so that bids are updated automatically.

We began to receive the first sales from advertising: the average CTR was 6.29%, promotion costs amounted to 8,000 ₽, and the total revenue for October was 967,981 ₽.

November

In November, we added semantics: in the “Color” field, we indicated not just “blue”, but “dark blue” and “electric” – this is a color that is defined as “bluish blue” or “blue with a gray tint”. It is used quite rarely – there is little competition for such colors.

Then we added more low-frequency queries to the cards, which helped to make the search more accurate. For example, “Christmas toys” is a high-frequency query, we included it in the product name. But “matte balls”, “glossy balls”, “glitter balls” are low-frequency ones, we included them in the product descriptions. There is less competition for such words, which means a higher chance of catching the eye of the buyer. In addition, we have checked all additional fields and filled them in such a way that products are shown in all filters and in relevant categories.

This is the card we originally had:

Card after the first optimization — added near-target queries:

Card after the second optimization — added low-frequency queries. This helped to bypass competitors who indicate only high- and mid-frequency queries in the title, description, and additional fields:

As soon as we sold several sets, the card indexed the keys by which users searched for our product. So we managed to get to the top for these requests – which meant that it was no longer necessary to advertise for them.

On the contrary, we added high-frequency queries to advertising, because the products were indexed by low-frequency ones and it was possible to reach a new level. At the same time, we excluded from the promotion the positions of products that organically appeared in the top 4 results in 1-3 places.

CTR dropped to 3.57% due to high-frequency queries, for which this indicator is always lower than for low-frequency ones.

We spent 17,000 ₽ on promotion in November and sold toys for 7,857,451 ₽. Advertising on Wildberries helped us gain a foothold in keywords – the graph below shows their growth. By mid-November, search volume peaked.

*Key queries grew gradually from late October to mid-November*

By mid-November, we sold out some items of goods and removed them from stock. And by December, there were almost no leftovers in the warehouse – a comprehensive promotion helped.

What did the promotion on Wildberries give

We were able to increase sales of goods: compared to September, when we had not yet launched advertising, October revenue increased by 233 times and amounted to 967,981 ₽. By November, revenue increased to ₽7.8 million.

A clear strategy helped to achieve such results:

Glue several cards into one to increase the likelihood of a sale, conduct SEO optimization.
Run ads in the Wildberries search for low-frequency queries.
Keep track of which cards go to the top and remove them from the promotion.
Add high-frequency queries to ads when products are indexed by medium- and low-frequency keywords.

At the same time, we did not sell the goods at the lowest price and did not keep the cost. On the contrary, they raised prices as sales increased.

*From the end of October, we began to gradually increase the prices for sets, and by November they reached their peak.*

In total, we invested 25,000 ₽ in advertising on the marketplace, and made sales for 8 million ₽.

As you can see, the strategy is simple, SEO and advertising on the marketplace work, and we did not need a whole staff of marketers and SEO specialists to launch it all. I invite you to discuss the case and ask questions in the comments.