A brand focused Black Friday drives sales for ecommerce retailer

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Abigail Ahern specialises in lavish soft furnishings and home accessories

They aim to inspire you to decorate differently and are committed to creating impeccable pieces that will stand the test of time and transcend trends. Ambitious and keen to bring their marketing activity under one digitally coordinated approach to grow their business, they appointed Impression to manage their SEO and paid media channels in August 2020.

The Challenge

Early into our relationship, we were challenged with promoting Abigail Ahern’s deals for Black Friday, one of the most important ecommerce events of the year. Our SEO and paid media teams worked towards one common goal: to drive traffic from high-intent audiences to increase revenue.

We had the following objectives:
1. Increase revenue YoY
2. Achieve 1000% ROAS YoY

The Strategy

Previous marketing strategies had almost exclusively focussed on branded keywords and driving sales through frequent price promotions but Abigail Ahern did not feel that this approach accurately reflected the brand’s quality credentials. With this in mind, they expressed the need to maintain their brand’s premium status whilst running a successful sale campaign.

- Months before the event, our SEO team researched an optimal keyword targeting strategy for key category pages and populated them with high quality content
- This work to optimise thin pagesdrove organic traffic, and also supported search query matching for audience-targeted Dynamic Search Ads to attract non-brand search queries through paid search
- Paid campaigns moved away from using sales-led ad copy and instead used copy that would better reflect the quality of their brand, combined with ad extensions to highlight the current promotions
- Shopping campaign performance was improved with search query filtering to allow for more control of branded query matching, and product categories were split into separate campaigns for better budget management
- Display and paid social campaigns utilised retargeting which helped to convert traffic from each channel with optimisation based on intent
- Prospecting campaigns were set up across display and paid social to raise brand awareness and bring new audiences to the site

The Results

This campaign was awarded 'Retail Campaign of the Year' and the 2021 UK Biddable Media Awards.

The below results cover a time period of Nov 1st - 30th 2020 vs previous year:

1. 178.5% increase in revenue generated from organic and paid media channels

2. 1588% ROAS vs 691% previous year, paid search

3. 3000% ROAS, paid social

4. 100% increase in eCommerce conversion rate YoY