Jones Bootmaker PPC revenue increased by 375%

ClickThrough's paid search team crafted a tailored paid search strategy for Jones Bootmaker to increase online revenue and return on ad spend (ROAS).

Tailored PPC strategy gives massive revenue BOOST for jones bootmaker 

Jones Bootmaker is one of the UK’s leading footwear retailers, with more than 100 branches across the country. Like most High Street retailers, the brand has been keen to expand its e-commerce market, and turned to ClickThrough Marketing for advice on how to do this in early 2015.

Working closely with the Jones Bootmaker team, ClickThrough crafted a tailored PPC programme to increase online revenue and return on ad spend (ROAS).

"ClickThrough have strategically developed our paid search account in the last year and have delivered amazing year-on-year revenue growth whilst improving return on ad spend. Most importantly, this growth was achieved in the right areas and was aligned with our internal business objectives.

"It is clear that ClickThrough are experts in delivering the best possible PPC results for e-commerce retailers. They do this through a mixture of pro-activeness, creative thinking and strong communication skills with their clients. It is a pleasure to work with ClickThrough and we look forward to a successful 2016."

Liza Thomas
Jones Bootmaker, Search Marketing Consultant

The Brief

Jones Bootmaker wanted to optimise its paid search activities. The aim was to increase revenue while maintaining the same budget. The retailer specifically wanted to grow non-brand text activity as well as increase its presence on Google Shopping.

The Strategy

Google Shopping

This was made the key focus for the second half of 2015 as it was recognised that this channel was driving the best return on investment. ClickThrough also saw from its internal forecasting that there was an opportunity to spend more here without damaging the ROAS.

ClickThrough restructured the Jones Bootmaker Google Shopping campaigns using custom labels to identify high margin products and also consulted with third party feed management supplier Feedspark to optimise the feed to achieve more visibility on key search terms. As a result revenue increased by nearly ten times year on year with no tangible sacrifice to the ROAS.

Product Brand Keywords

As well as producing its own shoes, Jones Bootmaker stocks many leading brands, such as Barbour, Nike and Paul Smith. Keywords related to these product brands were identified as being strong revenue generators and a more aggressive strategy was fulfilled on these terms. As a test, extra budget was given to brands where Jones Bootmaker was competitive to ensure click share was strong in these areas. This test proved that it was important to ensure strong visibility on these terms as they delivered strong ROAS in the long-run.

“We still wanted to ensure that traditional text adverts on search were not forgotten about. Therefore, a full restructure and keyword expansion was done here to make sure we were covering long tail keywords as much as possible. More budget was placed into the brands that Jones Bootmaker stock as these were delivering a much stronger ROAS,” explained ClickThrough Marketing’s e-commerce paid search specialist, Ian Boyden.

Generic Keywords

Generic, upper funnel keywords such as “shoes” and “boots” can be extremely expensive and don’t always generate the best ROAS but they can be great for starting new customer journeys. Therefore, ClickThrough ensured that these terms were pushed in alignment with Jones Bootmaker’s promotional and seasonal calendar, using them when more budget was available. Google Shopping was also used more to target these generic terms as the team saw better performance from this channel.

“It is extremely important that you treat these keywords with respect as they can very quickly spend a lot of your budget. However, we found that generic keywords when pushed at the right times can provide great results in the long run. It is hard to see any results when you are only reporting using a last click model – so we used our bid management tool Kenshoo to find the right attribution model for Jones Bootmaker and ensure budget is spent in the right areas,” Ian said.

Remarketing

Another strategy which helped improve performance was the introduction of remarketing, which allowed Jones Bootmaker to achieve more visibility on the SERPs for returning visitors. Display remarketing was also used in conjunction with Jones Bootmaker promotions to bring back basket abandoners to the site and improve overall conversion rates. It is also a great tool to upsell products to those who have purchased in the past.

“Remarketing is the best channel for completing the customer journey, a lot of the investment Jones Bootmaker place in non-brand keywords would be in vain if a strong strategy was not in place to capitalise on the new visitors who are still in the pre-purchase stage,” Ian said.

Brand Keywords

To allow shopping, branded, generic and remarketing channels to gain more exposure the ClickThrough team knew that they would need to make cutbacks elsewhere in the account due to limited budget. ClickThrough recognised that brand keywords already had strong organic visibility and it didn’t make sense to invest in PPC here so these keywords were paused.

“A simple tactic made a big difference to the budget available and generated more incremental revenue. However, you can only maintain this if you can show that your organic links are making up for the loss in PPC brand traffic,” Ian said.

The Results

As a result of the new paid search strategy implemented by ClickThrough, revenue from non-brand PPC (text and Google Shopping) activity increased by 375% year on year on the back of 150% more investment. Despite the huge increases in volume, the return on ad spend (ROAS) grew by nearly 90%.

Furthermore, our work on the text adverts led to the click-through rate of the adverts improving by nearly 80% and cost per click decreasing by 11% as the account became more streamlined.