Designer menswear brand Luke 1977 initially approached us with the goal of growing their ecommerce business overall through full-scale ecommerce marketing strategies. However, we immediately found that their existing Google Ads account structure was not set up to have a substantial impact on new audiences. Considering that Google Ads are one of the most effective methods of reaching new customers, Luke 1977 were missing out on tons of new business.
When we initially started working together, Luke’s Google Ads account placed significant effort on promoting branded terms such as “Luke” or “Luke 1977”
There’s some benefit to this, but a large portion of this cost could be better spent elsewhere.
In essence, their strategy prioritised retaining existing customers, over the acquisition of new ones. Across many months of collaboration, we have been able to restructure Luke’s Google Ads strategy to increase brand awareness and find new customers, which has brought with it a wealth of benefits for their business.
Luke 1977’s branded search campaign was spending the majority of its daily budget on sustaining its search presence against wholesale retailers such as House of Fraser. However, we identified that this campaign structure was not optimised for achieving the lowest cost-per-click (CPC) possible.
In fact, 95% of Luke’s monthly Google Ads budget was being used on these branded terms, in both search and shopping campaigns.
When it comes to brand search campaigns, keeping a lower bid is always the best bet. For example, Luke 1977’s brand already showed up as result number one for the branded term “Luke” in organic search results, so having a high bid on a paid advertisement was unnecessarily doubling down on this.
Working collaboratively with Luke, we advised them to follow Cake's Branded Search campaign structure, which would reduce the cost of branded search results, whilst ensuring that Luke 1977 were still visible amongst their wholesale competitors. Equally, it would give them more room in their budget to expand their Ads account to target new customers too.
By following Cake’s branded search campaign structure, Luke’s CPC for branded search terms was reduced from £0.55 to £0.14, whilst maintaining search impression share and click share. In other words, their daily expenditure dropped by 3/4, giving them an additional proportion of budget a day to use on non-branded search terms, which was achieved by optimising just one campaign.
Next, we undertook the task of dividing the Performance Max campaigns (campaigns that span across multiple paid ad types, including search and shopping ads) into two distinct categories: branded and customer acquisition. Through our strong relationship with Google Ads Dublin, we gained access to a feature not yet released on the platform; adding negative keywords to our Performance Max campaign. This meant that any search that included branded search terms could be excluded from our customer acquisition campaign.
With this new capability, we could more effectively manage our shopping spend. And so, we created two campaigns, one that naturally focused on "Luke" product searches, and one that focused on generic terms, such as “menswear,” whilst excluding branded terms like "Luke." This approach allowed us to divide Luke’s daily budget, and dedicate a big chunk of it on building a new audience.
Furthermore, as a well-established brand with over 100,000 SKUs in their warehouse, Luke’s Google Ad Account benefited greatly from our development team's creation of a dynamic shopping feed. The dynamic feed automatically excluded products from displaying in ads when their most popular sizes were out of stock, which would stop traffic being directed to products with slow-selling variants such as 3XL.
One month after implementing this strategy, we saw an impressive 2.3 million impressions specifically targeted at generic terms. This in turn drove 12,000 users to the store for the first time, and these users could then be incorporated into the re-marketing funnel, via paid social platforms and email sign ups.
We've clearly divided targeting generic terms to acquire new customers and branded searches to retarget existing ones. And this newly refined ratio of expense has provided us and Luke 1977 with the confidence to scale the amount spent on Google Ads overall.
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