SITUATION

Montane is a leading outdoor clothing brand known for innovative, lightweight, breathable clothing and equipment for endurance sports and activities in extreme environments. Their products are sold in several well known high street stores and through multiple online vendors. They also have their own online shop where people can buy products direct.
After several attempts to get paid search marketing to work for them, Montane were unable to get anything close to an acceptable return and agreed to work with us as a final attempt to get profitable results from AdWords.
After analysing the account and discussing their needs we set some realistic expectations as to what we felt was achievable with our input.

FOCUS

We found several issues with the previous structure and strategy that were limiting performance and felt that a standard approach to AdWords structuring and bid strategies would be unlikely to yield significantly different results. So we developed a bespoke structure that suited the client’s site and allowed us a more innovative way to approach the market.
Google Shopping had performed poorly when previously attempted, but we felt that as a reputable ecommerce business it should really be a key sales driver. Looking closely at the previous data the traffic itself wasn’t particularly poor quality, but generally the cost per click bids meant they were paying well over the odds for a fair amount of very generic traffic and there was big disparity between the performance of the generic and the branded traffic. So we used a clever manipulation of the AdWords settings to separate the generic/branded search terms. By combining negative keywords and campaign priority settings we were able to make Google create the separation for us. And then by breaking the targeting down by product type and then setting bids at the ID level we were able to prioritise products dependent on performance.
We then used another innovative manipulation of the AdWords system to build out a search campaign structure. Our keyword research suggested that many people utilising a montane branded search don’t specify their gender, so for example ‘Montane Jackets’ is significantly higher volume of traffic than ‘Mens Montane Jackets’. So for the search Montane Jackets we had 3 options; take the ad to the men’s jackets, the womens jackets or a generic search page. Obviously none of those options is ideal as we’re not providing the best site experience for the individual, but we set campaign targeting exclusions to create male/female only targeted campaigns. That way we were able to direct the ads to the most suitable male/female landing pages for generic searches and give a visitor the best site experience to allow us to maximise performance.

IMPACT

As the account had never been profitable in the past we set the fairly conservative target of trying to break even initially while working towards the long term goal of hitting a profitable ROI and surpassing a revenue target. We were optimistic that would be possible, but even we were surprised at how quickly our work took off.
Firstly we saw a big improvement to the CTR as the ads were being catered to the individual, so were much more appealing and also by controlling the searches better to avoid waste and overspend on highly generic terms. We also saw a significant improvement to the site engagement from AdWords clicks due to the improved site experience as well as the improvement in traffic quality.
By improving CTR and landing page experience we significantly improved the quality score across the account which lead to the next vital improvement – the previously average CPC cost came down significantly. This came with an actual increase in traffic and not just by strangling the account. And ultimately all these things contributed to the key performance improvement…