Case Study
Whittard of Chelsea is a retail heavy, high street business selling coffee, tea, and related products, including luxury gift items.
When the pandemic hit, Whittard had to close its 47 stores across the UK, meaning it could no longer generate offline revenue. We needed to drive additional revenue from our activity to help close the gap created by the forced store closures.
We ran ads for Whittard across search, shopping, discovery, display and video, using Google Ads’ smart-bidding strategies to drive maximum performance across all channels.
Consumer behaviour differed during the lockdown. We also had to reach customers online who would normally buy Whittard products offline.
We added various audiences into our Google Ads account on ‘observation’; this allowed us to gather data on audiences that performed best, which we fed back into our smart-bidding strategy so that high-performing audiences were targeted more aggressively.
We also uploaded Whittard’s first-party customer data and used this to create ‘Similar to’ lists to be used in our prospecting campaigns, and used insights from Audience Manager to plan our audience tests and tailor creative to match the audiences being targeted and appeal to them individually rather than a one size fits all approach.
Historically, we only ran ads for Whittard in the UK as they only have an English website. We ran campaigns targeting English-speaking customers across five new territories (Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark) to drive additional revenue. We included the delivery price for each market in the ad copy to ensure only users willing to pay the shipping costs would click-through to avoid wasting budget.
Prior to the pandemic, we were using a Target CPA bidding strategy for non-brand search. When stores closed, conversion rates increased as users moved online so we switched the bidding strategy to Maximize Conversion Value to make the most of the influx of search demand. We also increased budgets temporarily while demand was high. Once we had enough data to optimize with, we moved to Target ROAS.
For brand search, we use Target Impression Share. Maintaining full visibility for brand searches was crucial as loyal customers who would usually buy in-store had to find the brand online.
We used Google Smart Shopping campaigns to manage Whittard’s shopping ads. We also created a supplemental feed to split out products more granularly, and worked with ProductCaster to further break out important products and optimize product groups and descriptions.
We ran campaigns ahead of Q4, Whittard’s peak season, to increase reach and build brand and product awareness, using the messaging “Share the wonder of a Whittard gift”. This was in line with the overall brand messaging and allowed us to target Black Friday and Holiday season shoppers.
We also ran tests to identify which ad formats, creatives and audiences delivered the best reach and awareness, ads that drove higher performance were utilised more and that budget was weighted towards audiences with higher conversion rates.
The revenue we generated in 2020 was over double the original goal.
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Case Study
Case Study
Case Study