Vegan Nutrition E-commerce Business (NDA protected)

The Client

We manage this client on a White Label basis on behalf of one of our agency clients and therefore are keeping company details anonymous. This client is a Vegan nutrition supplement specialist, selling products from protein powders through to liquid vitamin drops.

The Brief

The client simply wanted to improve sales from the Google search channel. They had been running PPC for a number of years and had done fairly well, however over time they noticed that their PPC sales were lagging behind that of their other marketing channels, such as Organic Search and Social Media and were wondering why PPC wasn’t following suit. When we first started working with this client, they were only operating their PPC campaigns in the UK, but were also looking to expand into the US and Germany

PPC Strategy

The initial goals were very simple with the UK account, and there were lots of opportunities to quickly improve the results. We first noticed that the client were not running campaigns for all of their products and not for any specific reason given that they were happy to uncap budget so long as ROI was above 300%. We therefore quickly set about adding new campaigns to cover the clients full range of products as well as updating their shopping feeds to include newly released products.

The campaign structure for all accounts was quickly rebuilt as the inherited structure was not optimal. We built out campaigns on a per product basis, each with a BMM and Exact match campaign variant. Within each campaign we then had single keyword ad groups to target every available keyword that was relevant to each product from extensive keyword research. We also built up a significantly larger list of negative keywords as some of the more generic keywords used had brought in a large number of irrelevant searches, such as people looking for information on what foods they can eat as a vegan or ‘how to become vegan’, not searches that were converting cost effectively into sales.

Beyond re-building the campaigns, we found that the ads used previously were very generic and weren’t doing the products justice. This client is a market leader in their field with a lot to shout about in terms of their products, so we comprehensively re-wrote all of the ads and made sure to include responsive text ads too which hadn’t previously been utilised.

International PPC Strategy

A few months into us working with this client, they had seen great results in the UK and were looking to quickly expand into both the USA and Germany. They had previously tried to run campaigns in the USA but hadn’t been able to run them cost effectively.

We set about replicating a similar campaign structure for both the USA and Germany. Not being native German speakers, we built the campaign structure in English and then had all of the keywords and ads translated into German, meaning we could manage the ads account as we would if it were in English, however the translations were making this fully relevant to the German market too.

In both cases of the international campaigns, we started out very slowly, keeping bids low and trying to get as much data as possible before gradually and consistently increasing budgets. When entering a new market, you can’t rely on brand recognition to help improve conversion rate and you have to market cleverly in order to compete against current market leaders.

The client’s website was excellently equipped to handle international traffic and over time we have been able to significantly improve sales at a profitable ROAS. Previous internationalisation campaigns had to be paused due to ineffective ROAS, so both us and the client were very pleased with the results of this.

The results

UK

We started on the UK account in September 2018. At this point, this campaign was spending in the region of £2,500 per month and was achieving an average of 200 transactions per month.

By September 2018 we had doubled average monthly sales at the same time as reducing the cost per sale marginally. The increase in revenue was over 150%.

Fast forward to our most recent results, from January 2020 through to May 2020 we consecutively achieved the highest revenue the company had ever achieved from PPC every month whilst continuing to make the cost per sale cheaper. In our best month, we achieved just under 1,000 transactions from PPC and a revenue over 500% higher than the account was first achieving when we started back in September 2018.

US & Germany

As mentioned previously, the company had previously tried to run campaigns in the US but had not been able to make it profitable, whereas Germany was a completely new market for the client.

In the US, a key success was making this profitable. However, we have taken this further and alike to the UK results, we have achieved consistent monthly records in terms of sales and revenue from PPC every month since March 2020 (July 2020 at time of writing).

For the campaigns in Germany, we have taken the campaigns from 0 to almost 100 orders within the most recent (and best performing) month with a ROAS of over 350%.