Case Studies - Anonymous - Inseev Interactive

Case Study

Client Overview

This client is a California-based fashion and lifestyle company. While they originally started as a surf brand, it has since expanded worldwide and been adopted by skaters, musicians, DJs, and artists alike, creating an iconic brand that has remained anchored in it’s Southern California roots.

Client: Anonymous

Business Type: E-Commerce

Services:

Content Marketing Link Building Full Service Orchestrated SEO

The Situation

Although this client had previously shied away from traditional online advertising due to strong overall brand strength and notoriety, an increase in auction presence from many of their retail partners began to cause a decline in organic traffic and orders. As a result, they launched branded search and shopping campaigns in order to regain some of their lost presence. The campaigns were initially managed in-house, but due to challenges in management, particularly within shopping campaigns, they turned to Inseev with two primary objectives:

Improve reach, efficiency, and order volume within branded search on a very limited budget

Increase scale and order volume of shopping campaigns, which were extremely limited in their current reach

What Happened

Like with any new paid search client, we first performed an audit on this brand’s currently-existing paid search account and shopping feed in order to identify both short-term and long-term opportunities for improvement. We found a number of options for improvement through restructuring search campaigns, as well as multiple areas where the shopping feed was not following best practices, resulting in severely inhibited performance. Following our audit, we created a strategy that would enable us to tackle smaller steps starting on day 1 of management, while we continued to work on larger-scale projects in the background.

Strategy 01

Shopping Feed Update

The prior shopping feed setup was porting product data directly from the site’s Magento feed, with no title or description optimizations, leaving product titles missing a variety of key factors. Additionally, the feed that was being imported to Merchant Center did not contain any GTIN data. While this was not necessarily required, as the feed contained other applicable product identifier data, the lack of GTINs was severely harming their ability to compete with resellers on a high volume of products. Because Google’s algorithm was unaware that the feed was offering the same products as these competitors, their overall impression opportunities were severely limited. We rebuilt their shopping feed in order to include fully-optimized product titles, as well as updates to additional product data fields to improve both algorithm-side data as well as assisting in ease of internal campaign management.

Strategy 02

Search Campaign Rebuild

The branded search campaigns were set up with mixed keyword match types within ad groups – while ad groups all had a tight semantic intent, there was an inconsistent flow of search terms between exact match and broad match keywords within the same ad groups. We restructured the campaigns for breakdowns by keyword match type in order to ensure higher CPC bids for exact match keywords that were more likely to convert and lower CPCs for longtail broad match keywords. While this is a best practice for any paid search account, it was doubly important for this account, given the strict budget caps we were working with.

The account was also running ads via Adwords’ old 2 headline expanded text ad format – when completing our account restructure, we updated ads to the new 3 headline formats in order to maximize the available space that their ads could be taking on the SERP. In addition to updating ad formats, we also wrote more granular ad headlines, descriptions, and URL paths in order to improve the ad relevance portion of quality score, leading to lower overall CPCs.

Strategy 03

Bid Modifier Implementation

Although the account was already running its campaigns on manual bid management, our preferred bidding strategy, when we took it over, we noticed that the campaigns were not utilizing bid modifiers to help ensure spend was being allocated to the best-performing areas. While using these modifications is important in any campaign, they are doubly important in campaigns with limited spend such as these. Through implementing applicable modifiers in geographic targeting, age, gender, device, and more, we were able to minimize spend in underperforming areas to ensure that additional spend was available to cover higher-performing areas.

Results

We were able to see both immediate and long-term improvements aligning with the primary goals and KPIs as we implemented our changes on the account. In the first 3 months of our management, we were able to see the following results versus the prior 3 months:

Shopping Performance

340% increase in impressions
227% increase in clicks
149% increase in conversions
136% increase in revenue
4% lift in CPCs as traffic scaled

Search Performance

25% increase in CTR
24% increase in clicks
23% decline in CPCs
4% decline in spend
36% increase in conversions
51% increase in revenue
57% increase in ROAS

We were able to see both immediate and long-term improvements aligning with the primary goals and KPIs as we implemented our changes on the account: In the first 3 months of our management, we were able to see the following results versus the prior 3 months:

Shopping Performance