Clarks | PPC

The client

Clarks is a British-based, international shoe manufacturer and retailer. It was founded in 1825 by brothers Cyrus and James Clark in Street, Somerset, England – where it still has its headquarters. The company has over 1,000 stores and franchises around the world.

The challenge

Due to more competition than ever for back to school footwear, it became an ever-growing struggle for Clarks to remain highly competitive during their peak time of the year on the Google SERP and they needed to make budgets work more efficiently than previous years.

Clarks objectives

To use the budget more efficiently, therefore driving a higher conversion rate, with a lower CPA.
To increase new customer volumes during this peak period.
To use historical data, third party tools and platform partner insights to drive YoY school-specific session and order growth

Find the shoe that fits

To tackle the problem, our team created an action plan by segmenting and reviewing the account by campaign type/ad format and highlighting which activity would have the biggest impact on average CPCs and conversion rates.
Insights from the Google Retail Specialist team, keyword planner, search query reports and third party keyword tools guided our strategy in to where there were pockets of opportunity to be capitalised on, as well as emerging trends on how consumers were searching in the industry.
Budget and bid reports were analysed from previous years, to understand trends in peaks and troughs for demand, competition entering the market etc throughout the back to school period, and from which a strategy could be formulated.

+ 21 %

Traffic

+ 43 %

Conversions

+ 18 %

Conversion rate

A layered approach to our strategy

Strategy

To review all quality scores within the account over a recent period to make the ad, landing page and experience as relevant as possible
To improve shopping feed and shopping campaign structure
To implement an audience strategy, incorporating key remarketing lists, similar audiences, in-market audiences as well as seasonal audience directly related to back to school

Tactics

We had the account whitelisted for a Google Alpha audience set, which offered the account four new ‘Seasonal Audience – Back to School’ audiences to use layered on to school campaigns. This gave a competitive advantage and control over bidding to these new audiences.
Audiences were added at a broad level so AGY47 could determine key demographics, returning visitors and similar audiences/in-market audiences, taking a layered bidding approach to these based on where the user is in the customer journey
Shopping feed restructuring of school products, with shopping campaigns then updated and cleverly segmented based on the clients business objectives
Scripting and automation across school campaigns to report on average positions, click share etc of core keywords, as well as automating bidding based on historical conversion rates, competition and emerging trends.

The results

+21% traffic
0% change in CPC
-16% CPA
+43% conversions
+18% conversion rate

By building a solid foundation for school campaigns and gathering valuable insights into customer behaviour over this period to then use as part of the strategy, the team exponentially improved the success of back to school, paving the way for similar success in the campaigns to follow. The work carried out by the AGY47 team gave Clarks their best PPC back to school period ever and overachieved on targets set by the client.

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