Record High PPC eCommerce Conversion Rate and Revenue: The Village Butcher

Independent Essex-based butchers profits from over £52,200 in revenue from PPC advertising during the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic

The Village Butchers achieved a record high conversion rate and ROI from 16th March to 16th April 2020, exceeding revenue over the previous period by 5,232%.

About The Village Butchers

The Village Butchers is an independent, family-owned and run butchers based in Brentwood, Essex. It provides traditionally farmed, free-range meat and deli goods to households across the UK with a nationwide delivery service.

An opportunity for local businesses to fill the online grocery shortage gap

The coronavirus COVID-19 lockdown led to a lot of uncertainty surrounding grocery shopping; altered supermarket opening hours, tightened shopping rules and food shortages caused by panic-buying all exacerbated anxiety and stress. Independent, local businesses, such as The Village Butchers, were able to meet demands left unfulfilled by oversubscribed online grocery stores and supermarkets, many of which were unable to offer home delivery slots for many weeks.

Having previously successfully run PPC activity with Trafiki Ecommerce over the Christmas and New Year period, The Village Butchers was well aware of the benefits of advertising online via Google, Bing and Facebook. Campaign activity had been temporarily paused while the client’s Shopify website underwent necessary maintenance and development work. Trafiki Ecommerce was able to assist and expedite website development work in order to prepare the website and advertising assets by the second week of March.

We knew that our client’s limited budget would need to be maximised across Search Engines and different campaign types, so set ourselves daily targets to adhere to in order to reach and exceed desired revenue and ROAS figures.

Results

The below results are PPC last-click attribution only.

First-click vs. last-click attribution over this period shows a 76% increase in revenue when analysing data using first-click attribution. Taking this into account, and acknowledging that the client’s Shopify website was attracting negligible levels of traffic prior to their PPC relaunch, we can predominantly account for the impressive uplift in results for Organic and Direct traffic.

Site-wide results

PPC campaigns elevate performance via other traffic sources

This PPC halo effect shows the impact of effective e-commerce online advertising, extending far beyond the last click revenue recorded in Google Analytics. The Village Butcher experienced a noticeable uplift in Organic Search and Direct traffic, with revenue increasing 989% and 11,408% respectively.

Approach

• Launched Smart Shopping campaigns segmented by high priority and low priority products, enabling us to control ROAS targets for each.
• Optimised product titles and descriptions. Important keywords were front-ended within the product titles, “accessory” but vital information such as meat weight and portion/package size was appended to the end of the product titles. We ensured that on-page descriptions were thorough and sufficient for each product.
• Targeted England only as opposed to UK-wide – budget was conserved for this higher ROAS geo-location.
• Within Search campaigns we focused primarily on exact match keywords due to a higher conversion rate and lower CPA historically.
• Sourced and implemented more ‘online’ and ‘delivery’ keywords – these terms were peaking due to the coronavirus situation.
• Built an extensive negative keyword list, excluding searches for out-of-area locations such as ‘online butchers surrey’ and ‘butchers that deliver kent’. Despite searchers showing high intent through their use of ‘online’ and ‘delivery’ terms, we established that out-of-area geo terms converted at a much lower rate than non-geo terms or more local geo terms.
• Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) and Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) promoted the client’s fast and reliable UK-wide delivery service, reassuring searchers that The Village Butchers was very much open for “business as usual”.

Are you maximising your return on investment online?

A large number of online retailers are managing to thrive during this lockdown, with a nation heading online to shop for essentials (and non-essentials) to establish some sort of sense of normality.

Retail and FMCG are among some of the fastest-growing e-commerce categories at present. If you currently sell products online, or would like to take your business online, then we can help. Get in touch with us by booking a free 30-minute discovery call or call us on 0203 411 2680.