Our Challenge
Rising traffic costs in an extremely competitive market that’s showing no signs of slowing down.
An up and coming menswear brand approached us with a task: Profitably grow their business with a core focus on first order profitability.
One of the early quotes from the Marketing Director was: “We’ve spent a fair bit on ads but we’ve had to start focusing on lifetime value.”
Now, this was a red flag to us straight away. First order profitability should be the benchmark for any brand, but if you know the t-shirt space at all, it’s extremely competitive and a race to the bottom for price.
Our Strategy
Cut waste, fix the foundations and work out how to increase AOV
1. Cutting Wasted Ad Spend
We began with a full account audit and found that 34% of ad spend was irrelevant traffic. Irrelevant meaning completely wasted spend for either products that didn’t sell at all or competitor search terms.
2. Fixing Feed Issues
The recurring Google Shopping feed errors are and will always be a profit margin killer for brands. Irrelevant headlines, poor imagery, missing attributes all hinder the ability for someone to find what they’re looking for.
3. Restructuring for Scale
Google Ads: We restructured their account to focus on the different categories within their business. Sure they did other products but the focus was to focus spend on their mens t shirts to begin with and then roll out into trousers etc. With CPC’s low, you’d think the conversion rate would be good enough to sell a t shirt thats around £30 RRP. Wrong. Well not in this case. The CVR was so low and the so to was the profit margin, they had to fix the CVR and test bundles.
We did this in a 2 fold approach.
- identify which pages had low conversion rates, on what device and what needed to be done to fix these.
- Once we had understood what pages needed that extra love and adjusted the pages to increase conversion rate, we then added options to buy 5 and 7 pack’s instead of just the single t shirt.
The Results
We rolled out changes in phases to allow algorithms time to adapt, without performance dropping off a cliff. Within weeks, the impact was very clear:
- Customers wanted to buy multiple t shirts. AOV went from £32 to £83 in less than 1 month
- Conversion rate went from 0.8% to 2.6% in 6 weeks
- 13% overall NCAC reduction in week 1
- 180% increase in revenue by the end of month 2
- 9% increase in first-time purchases (Week 2)
By cutting waste and simplifying the account, we helped this brand break out of stagnation and into scale.
Conclusion
Brands shouldn’t settle for “just okay” performance. With the right account structure, strategy, and ongoing optimisation, we managed to grow this brand a lot quicker than they thought was possible. Sometimes the changes are obvious when they’re highlighted to you, sometimes we just need an extra set of eyes to take a look under the hood.