Lulu Guinness

Paid search strategy increases revenue by 68%.

Lulu Guinness is famous for her unique and quintessentially British handbags and accessories. Her quirky designs are sold in department and fashion stores worldwide.

The Lulu Guinness digital team approached Leapfrogg in 2012 to manage their paid search strategy. Although campaigns were performing relatively well, the feeling internally was that the channel wasn’t being fully leveraged. A key challenge for Lulu Guinness in search is that they ‘compete’ with their stockists and trade partners, impacting impression share and the cost per click for ‘pure’ brand terms, as well as ‘brand + product’ terms.

For the period 2012-2013, our brief was to increase brand awareness, customer acquisition and revenue from paid search, whilst also significantly improving ROI. A specific target was set by the client to increase revenue from this channel by 50%.

What we did

Phase one focused on the brand strategy, with the objective of ensuring Lulu Guinness captured a greater percentage of impression share, driving highly qualified traffic at the lowest possible cost.

We completely restructured campaigns based on product feed data and optimised ad extensions to ensure adverts were as relevant as possible, thereby increasing click-through rates and lowering the average cost per click.

We also created and tested new ad copy variations, better aligned to USPs and sales messages. Budgets were reallocated based on seasonal search volume data to ensure we were maximising traffic and sales at key times of the year. Negative keywords were added to avoid wasted impressions whilst rolling out the campaign across Bing and Yahoo to increase exposure, traffic and sales.

Phase two focused on a non-brand strategy which had historically not performed due to high competition for terms such as ‘designer handbag’. We put in place a ’light touch’ non-brand strategy, testing search terms and refining accordingly. We also optimised their product feed and created a product listing ads campaign.

A two-tier remarketing campaign was also introduced to target non-converting visitors with incentives to purchase, which included seasonal and year-round campaigns.

In line with this, we identified that email marketing works particularly well for Lulu Guinness. There is a long consideration period with luxury purchases so visitors to the website do not necessarily buy first time around. However, a high percentage will purchase later on as a result of receiving an email. Therefore, a key focus was placed on data capture and measuring the impact of paid search on eCRM revenue.

Results

In terms of revenue, we significantly exceeded the 50% growth target. Paid search revenue was up 68% in 2013 compared to 2012.

The overall return in investment for paid search has also increased by 8% since we took over management of the campaign, which is fantastic given the growth in revenue.

On top of this, email newsletter sign-ups were up by 19% year-on-year.

What does the client have to say?

“Leapfrogg has proven to be a diligent, organised and knowledgeable group of digital marketers. Most importantly, they have delivered against targets. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them as a digital marketing partner to brands operating in the premium retail sector”.

Paul Spinks, Managing Director at Lulu Guinness.