The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

The Drum Search Awards The Drum Awards Advertising

Funky Pigeon: Increasing YOY revenue by 210% with Fathers Day campaign

Author

By Awards Analyst, writer

May 25, 2017 | 8 min read

London-based digital performance agency, Found, won various awards, including 'PPC - Best Use of Paid Search as Part of a Programmatic Strategy' at the 2017 Search Awards, for its work with Funky Pigeon on their Father's Day campaign.

Background

Found was challenged to deliver a year-on-year uplift in sales of 40% and improve or, at minimum, maintain ROI for Father’s Day.

The team set out to co-ordinate a multi-layered approach which would not just deliver the required sales uplift, but also provide a foolproof, technologically robust approach for future activity.

Found’s core strategy consisted of three cleverly intertwined phases:

  1. Fully optimise Father’s Day Paid Search and Shopping campaigns to ensure it was capitalising on all high-intent traffic.
  2. Layer on RLSAs, DFSAs and Analytics Retargeting Audiences to drive consideration for non-converting site visitors.
  3. Incorporate awareness channels such as Display, TrueView and Gmail Ads and measure the cross-channel uplift these had on a first-interaction model.

Playing a halo effect role across all three phases were additional custom scripts that synced up to Funky Pigeon’s TV schedule and increased bid modifiers across all paid channels during; and shortly after any TV activity to ensure Funky Pigeon brand remained top of mind with users browsing across devices after the ad was aired.

Objective

With Father’s Day being a key seasonal purchase time for Funky Pigeon, Found was tasked with:

  • Delivering a year-on-year uplift in sales of 40%
  • Improving or, at minimum, maintaining ROI for Father’s Day

Background

Leading personalised greetings cards and gifts supplier Funky Pigeon has been working with digital performance partner Found since Feb 2016. During Q2 2016, Found was challenged with delivering a year-on-year uplift in sales of 40% and improve or, at minimum, maintain ROI for Father’s Day.

Previously Funky Pigeon’s Paid Media mix had consisted solely of Paid Search and TV and Found therefore knew that if they were to hit these objectives, it would need to incorporate and integrate additional awareness and consideration channels into its existing Paid Search performance strategy.

However, the approach didn’t come without obstacles. It goes without saying, that basing any display activity on a last-click model will end in failure. This proved a major challenge for Found, as the only way of measuring the success of upper funnel activity was through View-Through conversions in AdWords.

This form of measurement was not nearly robust enough, and provided zero visibility on cross-channel uplift. In order to overcome this challenge, Found therefore accessed the ‘GDN Impression Beta’ in Google Analytics, allowing it to assess the value of each impression and its role in the path to conversion. With the use of ‘GA Multi-Channel Funnels’, Found could then see where display channels were the first interaction in the conversion path, and analyse the uplift this had on search and direct.

evenfunkierpigeon.com

Strategy

Using Google Analytics, Found identified key audience segments that had favourable behavioural metrics and high conversion rates. The audience profile below formed the framework for all targeting:

Female iPhone users between the ages of 25 and 34, interested in movies, shopping, travelling, reading and living in London

The team’s implementation then followed a solid and ambitious plan, combining all activities together.

Phase 1

Capturing the high converting traffic from search was pivotal in achieving a 35% increase in conversion rate. Extensive feed optimisation, and a well built out campaign structure, facilitated in Shopping contributing to 30% of the revenue figure on a last-click model. Found also duplicated their Shopping campaigns to layer non-converting RLSA audiences with a discount code through Merchant Promotions, further increasing Shopping conversion rates by 17%.

In terms of standard Paid Search, over 350 ad groups were built out so that every possible Father’s Day card and gift query was built out. This was done through a combination of SQRs from previous years, combined with research from Keyword Planner. Extensive creative testing and negative keyword expansion was carried out which allowed the team to deliver an average Quality Score of 9, which was a key player in decreasing CPCs by 74%.

Phase 2

Found used extensive Analytics data and audience profiling to drive a retargeting strategy on TrueView, Gmail and the GDN. This cross-platform approach enabled it to capitalise on users moving across multiple devices and channels. Contextual factors, such as onsite content, location and time of day, was combined with behavioural metrics, such as time onsite, session duration, and number of sessions, to create hyper targeted audience lists and creative. Found’s approach to retargeting contributed to 15% of the revenue based on a custom attribution model, based off hold-out tests that were run in previous campaigns.

Integrating cross-channel audience lists played a pivotal role in achieving a 35% YoY uplift in conversion rate. Demographics for Search Ads (DFSAs), allowed Found to upweight its search bid modifiers for the high converting audience of females between the ages of 25-34. Duplicate campaigns were also built so that discount codes and customized messaging could be shown to this specific segment. Working in tandem with DFSAs was RLSAs. Found crafted highly granular lists based, on landing pages, cookie periods, time on site and YouTube users. Users who had actively watched a Funky Pigeon TrueView ad were added into a separate list with aggressive bid modifiers. The team found that users who engaged with TrueView creative were 3x more likely to convert on a generic keyword.

funkypigeon

Phase 3

TrueView, Display and Gmail ads were all layered with core demographics, location and devices. However, Found also knew that even some of the broader-based targeting techniques would be successful as such a high volume of people are in-market for Father’s Day cards in June. It delivered ads in the following manner:

Using interest data from Analytics, Found created an affinity audiences campaign that targeted the core demographic make-up, combined with audience interests. Found also utilised ‘custom affinity audiences’ that identify themes based on the keywords and URLs that are entered, targeting users who expressed interest in these themes. Found analysed historic high performing Father’s Day keywords and built display ad groups around these for their contextual targeting. Aside from this, targeting competitor keywords allowed it to show up on publisher pages that were talking about competitors, stealing customers away from the competition.

On a first-interaction model TrueView & Display contributed to a massive 27% of the revenue, fuelling last-click sales for Paid Search & Shopping.

Playing a halo effect role across all three phases were then custom scripts that synced up to Funky Pigeon’s TV schedule and increased bid modifiers across all paid channels during; and shortly after running any TV activity. This tactic allowed the Funky Pigeon brand to remain top of mind while users were browsing across devices shortly after the ad was aired.

Results

Found achieved:

  • a whopping 210% increase in YoY revenue
  • increased Funky Pigeon’s ROI by a massive 1763%

In addition, Found adopted techniques, including GA post-impression tracking beta, that ensured that the activity and approach was a step above the competition, and as a consequence, the campaign’s success has strengthened the relationship between Found and Funky Pigeon with Found now looking to take things to the next level by adding a fourth tier to the overall strategy – loyalty and retention.

Found for Funky Pigeon

Client Testimonial

“We have been very pleased with the performance, energy and attention to detail the Found team have given us. We’ve seen significant uplift in key PPC metrics across the board, including a 1763% YoY rise in ROI for our Father’s Day campaign.” - James Atkinson, Funky Pigeon

The Drum Search Awards The Drum Awards Advertising

Content created with:

Found.

WE ARE FOUND.​

WE HELP BRANDS GET FOUND ONLINE.​

We’re the digital performance experts who devise and deliver more opportunities for brands to...

Find out more

Funky Pigeon

Find out more

More from The Drum Search Awards

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +