SARAH RAVEN
HOW HONCHO SCALED PPC REVENUE BY 344% FOR BRITISH GARDEN RETAILER SARAH RAVEN
Our work for Sarah Raven cleaned up at industry awards in 2021/22. Winning 2 UK Search Awards, A silver medal at the Global Search awards, Best Paid Search campaign at the The Drum Digital Advertising Awards and Best B2C campaign at the Drum Search Awards.
344%
SEARCH & SHOPPING REVENUE UP 344%
-15%
COST PER ORDER REDUCED BY 15%
49%
ROAS INCREASED BY 49%
INTRO
Sarah Raven is a published author and television presenter best known for her gardening skills and appearances on BBC’s Gardeners World. In 1999, with a seed list from her farm in East Sussex, Sarah Raven established her brand offering a comprehensive range of seeds, plants, and gardening kits.
The Sarah Raven brand prides itself on the quality of the products, and Sarah trials most of what we sell in her garden before they are offered “in store”. They are now seen as one of the UK’s leading direct to consumer gardening businesses.
With many awards under their belt, and new audiences to attract, Honcho was approached by Sarah Raven with one ambitious target in mind: to establish and grow new revenue channels via Google Search in 2020/21.
OBJECTIVES
Primary Objective
Grow YoY revenue through PPC and Shopping by 10%
Strategic Objectives
- Increase new customer acquisition from PPC by 15%
- Reactivate dormant customer accounts
- Increase incremental spend
Tactical objectives:
- Overall target CPA reduction
- Brand target CPA reduction
- Non-brand target CPA reduction
- Shopping target CPA reduction
STRATEGY
As the products are living/perishable, seasonal targeting was required. A comprehensive keyword strategy with 20,000+ keywords was required for an ever-changing inventory.
We used a multi-tiered approach for reaching new customers – using existing audience segments to reach high-value multi-buyers, and created additional tiers of communication for instant converters, slow converters and in-market.
All products with keywords researched, however volume of terms required meant effective management would prove tough and a number would fall under the “limited search volume” category.
Therefore we built specific campaigns:
Historical top-performing products, scheduled to run at peak purchasing times.
Overarching generic keywords covering common search terms.
Dynamic search ads covering niche products, generating impressive results on products that weren’t previously
identified.
We built two bespoke tools to assist with this project; a share of voice (SOV) tool and a bespoke crawler.
Our unique share of voice tool tracked SOV for both organic and PPC visibility which enabled us to react to the data collected. The SOV tool also highlights areas where Organic Search visibility is low compared to competition, which again can assist us in our targeting strategy.
RESULTS
Primary business objective:
- From 1st August 2020 to 31st July 2021, we increased site revenue by 69%.
Strategic objectives:
- Increased new customer acquisition by 189%
- Paid Media % of site revenue grew from 6.6% to 27.2% (vs. target of 18%).
- Incremental spend per customer increased by 26% (vs. target of 15%).
Tactical objectives:
- Overall CPA – 152% lower than target
- Brand CPA – 745% lower than target
- Non-brand CPA – 9% lower than target
- Shopping CPA – 18% lower than target
Additional benefits:
- ROAS up 66%
- Increased search market share from 2% to 25%.
- Search and shopping revenue up 344%
- 26% increase in incremental spend per customer
- Site revenue grew 85% YoY
- CPA down 15%
“The Honchō team was an excellent support throughout Q4, our busiest time of the year. Through strategic search, shopping and social campaigns, Honchō helped us to achieve some fantastic results.”
