Digital marketing for Cosmetics & Makeup Brand increases PPC revenue by 3,668%

What they Needed 

The client is a London-born, luxury makeup brand with a mission of simplifying makeup and enabling women to develop their own individual style.

As newcomers in the incredibly competitive cosmetics market, our client required specialist support to increase their online visibility and brand awareness, with the key objective of driving sales from new and repeat customers, whilst retaining a strong and positive Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

Prior to appointing WRD, the client had run PPC and SEO in-house with disappointing results. ROAS was 0.02 for their ad campaigns, with an ecommerce conversion rate of 0.11%.

Organic rankings (including brand terms) were performing very poorly, and organic traffic volumes were negligible.

WRD were brought in 9 months after the brand’s initial launch to completely revamp all the paid media and advertising campaigns, and initiate a full spectrum of onsite, offsite, and technical SEO changes in order to significantly increase e-commerce sales and drastically improve ROAS.

SEO 

Upon commencing activity, WRD ran a full technical SEO audit across the site, alongside a complete audit of the existing PPC campaigns.

Technical SEO fixes (e.g., implementing Schema, image optimisation, improving site speed etc.) were implemented as a result of the findings from the SEO audit and the Google Ads campaigns were totally rebuilt in order to follow best practice and support improved performance.

WRD ran dedicated keyword research to identify the key search terms/keyword themes and topics to target within the SEO and PPC campaigns. Alongside the research project, WRD audited and corrected the existing Google Analytics set up, including creating Goals and implementing Google Tag Manager.

PPC 

WRD’s PPC team focussed on both brand awareness and sales to make sure we reached a broad audience who were genuinely interested in their product range. When it came to Google Search ads, our main goal was to increase ROAS with our brand campaigns and to support the client’s ongoing influencer activities.

Display campaign tactics included a generic brand awareness campaign which reflected the website’s focus product range (which was updated on a monthly basis), as well as promotional display campaigns to support their ongoing sales events throughout the year.

Our Google Shopping target was to significantly increase the client’s ROAS from this channel. The PPC team focussed on their best-performing products through standard Google Shopping campaigns, whilst Google Smart Shopping campaigns were running to provide us with valuable data on product seasonality, and to identify products that performed well in any given period (so that they could be added to the standard Shopping campaigns). Video advertising also formed part of our PPC tactics to support display, through YouTube’s highly relevant placements.

Conversion Rate Optimisation 

Heatmap tracking was implemented in order to better understand the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) elements of the site, and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) commenced which included analysis of the shopping/checkout process focussed on improving conversion rates and lowering shopping basket abandonments.

The SEO team initiated the ongoing onsite content optimisation process (textual & video content) and began running a competitor analysis and tracking project in order to understand how larger and more established competitors approached their digital/online activity, including user journeys, up selling/cross selling tactics, shopping and checkout processes, messaging and SEO strategies.

Social Media 

The client’s YouTube channel was also fully optimised for increased visibility, video watch time, view duration, audience retention and click throughs, with recommendations also provided to the client on future video (and textual) content requirements, based on the user engagement data and client objectives.

The SEO and PPC teams also supported the client with activity around their specific Influencer campaigns (launches and on-going Influencer campaign support) as well as promotional campaign activity (e.g., Black Friday sales) in order to ensure ecommerce sales increased as a result of the client’s investment in these marketing and brand awareness activities.

Web Development

To support these improvements WRD’s development team migrated the website from the Shopify CMS to Magento, which included enhancing the product page designs and layouts, improving ecommerce and marketing features, building and adding additional bespoke user functionality, and improving and streamlining the shopping and checkout journey in order to increase conversion rates. The development team were supported by the SEO team during the launch process providing support in areas such as 301 redirect mapping and transferral of code and content optimisation to the new site.

Client Account Management & Reporting

Detailed reports from the SEO and PPC teams were provided on a monthly basis, which reviewed the ongoing performance improvements, analysed data trends, and also provided recommendations for both channels, based on client objectives and data insights.

Regular client/agency calls and meetings ensured all involved in the campaigns and projects understood upcoming plans, campaigns, priorities, and areas of focus for the coming months and quarters.

This full service, comprehensive campaign approach delivered the client with incredible results that continued to improve quarter on quarter and year on year.