690% revenue increase for Burton Snowboards

International PPC management case study

The brief

Burton is a global retailer of winter sports and snowboarding gear.

They chose to work with Search Laboratory in 2015, after struggling to get results for both their English and German PPC campaigns.

They were keen to improve the performance of their PPC campaigns, increase paid revenue and expand into new global markets.

 

5,000%

uplift in PPC revenue in French markets since 2016

690%

increase in PPC revenue from English and German campaigns in three years

15%

increase in ROI for generic key terms in the last 12 months

4

expanding into four new markets in 2019

The solution

  • Bring in mother tongue speakers to improve the performance of Burton’s French and German ads
  • Target head terms and ambiguous terms such as ‘burton jackets’ to compete against resellers for traffic
  • Expand the number of Bing campaigns to capitalise on high ROI we were seeing
  • Restructure the shopping campaigns to split out by brands, product category and gender
  • Launch display advertising to increase brand awareness
  • Implement Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) with a particular focus on generic keywords.

The results

  • 690% increase in PPC revenue between 2015 and 2018, for a 320% increase in spend
  • Launched paid campaigns in the French market in 2016; this now makes up nearly 10% of paid revenue
  • There has been a 5,000% increase in paid revenue in the French market since activity started
  • 15% increase in ROI for generic keywords in the last year

Employing a range of tactics saw a strong year on year increase in paid performance and revenue across all three markets. Thanks to these strong results, Search Laboratory has been asked to launch Burton’s paid campaigns into four new markets in 2019, three of which are non-English speaking.