Maximising the returns of new ecommerce functionality to fuel Annie Sloan’s online and business growth.
Project Highlights
Head of Marketing
Amy
Working with Common Ground is a breath of fresh air! Not only are they professional, but they fully engage with us as a business, invest in understanding what we want to achieve, come up with fantastic ideas and are a lot of fun to work with too. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.
The brief
With the launch of their new site, Annie Sloan introduced ecommerce functionality for the first time. Having already successfully worked with them to drive traffic to their stockists, we were tasked with introducing revenue-driving paid campaigns, while continuing to drive traffic to their stockists’ sites.
The Challenge
While a hugely exciting time, the addition of ecommerce functionality to the site presented some clear challenges we needed to overcome.
Our biggest challenge was the lack of previous ecommerce functionality meant that we were starting from scratch.
While we often launch ecommerce campaigns, we usually have data from other channels to work with and an understanding of conversion rates.
In this case, we had no historic data or comparable conversion data (driving traffic to stockist sites is different to direct online sales).
Additionally, without ecommerce functionality, we had never been able to make use of Google Shopping for the client.
This required a full setup, including linking the automated feed into Merchant Center and creation of an optimised product structure in Google Ads.
Finally, while Annie Sloan wanted to build revenue through the site, it was important for them to continue to support their stockists by referring traffic to their sites.
This meant that our campaigns had to have a dual focus.
The results
In the 12 months since the site launch, we were able to build paid campaigns which accounted for 30% of all site revenue as well as supporting another 30% in assisted conversions (where paid played a part, but wasn’t the final converting channel).
We initially focused the budget on Google Search campaigns, which have provided an 820% ROAS through a combination of A|B testing landing pages and account optimisation.
Following that, we introduced Google Shopping. Through optimisation of the Merchant Center feed to increase and improve product detail quality we were able to deliver a 295% ROAS within its first 6 months and this will continue to improve over time.
Through our testing and optimisation, we were able to achieve an average increase of 37% in the conversion rate across all paid channels.
Head of Paid Media
Sam Medlicott
The addition of ecommerce functionality was something we had been eagerly awaiting for some time, and it allowed a significant change in the project and our approach. Being able to drive increasing levels of revenue for a client is always exciting, but to build from scratch to a significant amount so quickly, while continuing to support their stockists with traffic, was extremely pleasing.
