Maley Digital helps start-up log & charcoal business generate more direct sales through their own website
Logs Online was started in 2020 by brothers Alan & Feral Murtagh, who saw an opportunity to offer premium quality charcoal and kiln-dried firewood to customers in the UK, Ireland and Spain. The business takes its environmental footprint seriously and has partnered with OneTreePlanted.org, an environmental charity that plant and raise one tree on its behalf for every firewood order received.
Alan and Feral had a strong understanding of online businesses and channels such as Google Ads and had already started creating PPC campaigns themselves. They saw results and recognised that they could further excel in their business and sales by employing experts to optimise and manage it.
The Goal Was to Maximise All Possible Sales for the Available Budget
When we took over the account, it was in pretty good shape and was delivering profits for the business. It was a case of fine-tuning and optimising the account to reach maximum performance. We embarked on a process of improvements as follows.
1. Keyword changes: We changed the keywords that weren’t split optimally. There are also multiple keywords in the same ad group that weren’t particularly relevant to each other.
2. Introducing Target CPA and other bidding strategies: All existing campaigns were using manual CPC, which is what we advised for most campaigns initially. However, upon gathering data on conversions from running the campaigns, we experimented with other bidding strategies, specifically Target CPA and Maximise conversions which have delivered great results for other clients where there is sufficient sales data.
3. Introducing Smart Shopping: The existing shopping campaigns used standard shopping, and the client hadn’t yet trialled Smart Shopping. We saw split-testing smart shopping versus the performance of the standard shopping campaign as an opportunity, which led to a higher rate of sales and a better cost per sale.
4. Adding specific locations to the keywords: The account used only generic keywords and didn’t mention specific locations. From our keyword research, we noticed an appetite for local log delivery as many people aren’t aware of national log delivery services such as Logs Online. So we set about creating a GEO campaign which targeted nearly every town in the UK and Ireland by name, for example, +Logs +(location), to help generate sales for this audience. This significantly expanded the existing campaign set and increased the scope.
5. Using Google Ads to promote video content: The client had created some excellent promotional video material across their social media channels and hadn’t realised that you can utilise Google Ads to promote marketing videos through YouTube. We suggested this to the client and have since been retargeting all website visitors as well as relevant audiences and demographics to expand our scope beyond search and shopping alone.
6. Adjusting the campaigns with seasonal products: We started working with Logs Online in the Spring. Since then, we have been through a couple of seasons where the weather has fluctuated, and naturally, this has had a varying effect on the popularity of the client’s various products. We have ensured that we have been able to adjust for this demand by ensuring that seasonal products have had full impression share during their busiest periods, specifically with the charcoal, BBQ and fire pit style products being very popular from June to August. As we crept into September and October, the Logs became significantly more popular. We have adjusted the budgets between the campaigns to maximise sales and conversion value for the client.
The client is thrilled with the results and continues to benefit from direct sales to their website throughout the year.
Alan Murtagh said, “Maley Digital offers a quality professional service by a team that knows what they are doing. We were flying solo, attempting PPC ourselves, until we found Maley. They are responsive and good value. They don’t spend our budget for the sake of it.”
