EMP UK selected Elixirr Digital to take over management of their PPC activity. EMP is a pure play store stocking the UK’s largest collection of official TV, movie, gaming and rock & heavy metal merchandise – stocking over 55,000 products.

They tasked us with doubling their return on ad spend (ROAS), reducing cost per acquisition and increasing year-on-year revenue by 150%. For a mature brand that has been growing for some time, this is quite a challenge.

Highlighting the issues

When we initially started working on the account, we completed an extensive audit to help provide focus to our activities. The main issues that were identified included:

• High spend
• Low return on ad spend (ROAS)
• High cost per acquisition (CPA)
• Low revenue (below client targets) even though the client was spending significant amounts each month

We were tasked with improving performance across the board, particularly with Black Friday and the busy Christmas period fast approaching. This was an extremely important time period for the client commercially, so we were acutely aware that the work we undertook would have to yield positive results quickly.

Using a carefully researched and structured action plan, we set about addressing the problem areas in order to achieve the desired performance.

Big Data Analytics for large scale analysis

Given the enormous size of the account – hundreds of campaigns, thousands of ad groups, hundreds of thousands of keywords – it was not feasible to use standard analysis tools to evaluate the account. As such, we used Big Data Analytics in order to gain useful insights from the client’s marketing data – making use of a range of tools in order to collate and analyse over 1.2 million rows of data.

This analysis enabled us to quickly cut wasteful areas in the account, focus exclusively on areas that have historically performed well, and restructure the account in order to streamline management and allocate spend more appropriately.

Putting analysis into action

Search campaigns were reorganised so that wasteful keywords and ad groups would be removed, profitable keywords were reorganised into more efficient and manageable ad groups, new ad copy was introduced across the board and new negative keyword lists were applied.

PLA campaigns were broken out into product level ad groups so that we could alter bids on individual products – allowing us to be more precise with spend and targeting.

Previously, these campaigns were only arranged into broad product category ad groups, which not only reduced relevance, but also made it difficult to discern which products were profitable and which were not. Therefore, these needed amending as a priority.

A master negative keyword list, comprised mainly of the results of the data analysis, was also applied throughout the account; immediately cutting down spend on thousands of wasteful, non-converting keywords.

These actions are all based upon a solid foundation of insight gained from data analysis and ultimately, have allowed us to improve the efficiency of the campaign.

An optimised account delivers results fast

Once optimisation began we quickly saw positive results. Within 2 weeks of implementing these changes to the account, EMP saw some impressive figures:

• Weekly spend dropped by 18.82% from €24,258 to €19,959
• Revenue generated per week increased by 49% from €42,029 to €62,920
• Average cost per acquisition dropped by 42% from €19.24 to €11.01
• Return on Ad spend (ROAS) improved by 186.7% from 0.75 to 2.15