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Brief
New Look is an award winning retailer and one of the UK’s most recognised fashion brands. Driven by their belief in ‘fashion for all’ New Look have been delivering a combination of innovation and value to their customers since the opening of their first shop in Taunton in 1969. Today, New Look has grown to become internationally recognised for young fashion, with over 1000 stores worldwide and millions of visitors each year.
Despite its inarguable success, New Look’s performance in search left much to be desired. Greenlight was engaged in August 2009 to take its search visibility to the next level and beyond. Within just two weeks, Greenlight had exceeded all expectations and achieved a 100% ROI, scaling up to a massive 306% ROI in our third month of engagement.
Objectives
- To rapidly and cost-effectively grow traffic and conversions to the New Look site
- To deliver at least 100% ROI from search as an integrated channel
- To affect change on the New Look website, through natural search optimisation and landing page design.
Strategy
As a leading fashion retailer New Look were looking for a search marketing company that could understand their needs and deliver rapid and tangible results from search. Greenlight was engaged to deliver just that through a holistic and integrated approach to paid and natural search.
We instantly recognised that New Look was practically invisible in natural search for non-brand searches and their paid search account was small and highly underdeveloped for such a recognised brand, highlighting a huge untapped opportunity.
Execution
Natural search
Greenlight immediately applied its ARC methodology to determine why the New Look site was performing so poorly in natural search. It demonstrated a number of technical problems which made it difficult for search engines to access New Look’s pages. Our analysis was a critical first step to putting New Look on the path to SEO success.
Despite these changes, the site still failed to achieve traffic-driving rank positions. New Look’s pages weren’t communicating adequately with the search engines that the site was relevant for the more generic fashion search terms that consumers regularly use. The situation required Greenlight to undertake a programme of content creation and improvement.
As a final step to the process, key pages required more inbound links from third party sites, as this is a key measure utilised by the search engines to determine the worthiness of a site to rank. Greenlight formulated and implemented a programme of link building to improve New Look’s profile. This included ongoing optimised press releasing, link solicitation, link governance, social media optimisation and content syndication.
Paid search
Greenlight undertook a comprehensive audit of New Look’s current campaign together with an in-depth analysis of the sector’s consumer search behaviour. We identified that New Look’s campaign was only scratching the surface of the opportunity available and provided insight into how it should be intelligently expanded in terms of target keywords, ad text and landing pages. Based on our initial analysis in August 2009, the site was only visible to 4.84% of searches across its key categories.
We undertook a campaign restructure, ensuring that the campaigns included all aspects of the website’s content. We also rectified the inconsistencies in the original structure where many keywords were placed in irrelevant clustered groups and themes. Greenlight took into account relevancy, landing page content, stock levels and most importantly revenue values per item of stock, rather than pushing items such as accessories, which drive very low returns on revenue. We created product specific ad copy, including keywords and terms which were more appealing and relevant to the user age group and demographic. High spending terms were isolated into their own campaigns to help manage levels of spend by keeping a tight control on visitor volumes and ROI levels.
Integrated search
As an integrated account with Greenlight operating both the natural and paid search channels, New Look’s search performance benefitted in several fundamental ways.
Firstly, with economies of scale and speed-to-market advantages in having both channels delivered by a single agency. Secondly, knowledge and experiences from each channel’s activities, on a keyword level, were instantly made available to the other channel’s analysts, promoting continuous improvement. Finally, being the central guardian of New Look’s search strategy, Greenlight was able to take a holistic view of the entire search channel to identify which keywords natural and paid search should cooperate on, or where one channel may be more suitable than the other. The best balance of natural and paid search was found, resulting in optimal return on New Look’s search budget.
Results
New Look saw impressive results right from the start of the engagement. Their average monthly visitors for search went from 80,000 to an astonishing 1 million in Jan 2010. From a PPC perspective, New Look’s initial CPA was £12, but by mid December 2009 they achieved an average CPA of £2.56, which is their lowest recorded CPA through PPC advertising (see figure attached). Our SEO results for generic terms grew week on week to over 100% on revenue. Orders and website visits continue to rise, and in January 2010, E-commerce takings were up by 625% compared with the previous year.
These results are all the more impressive when you consider that New Look tasked us with delivering a true ROI in excess of 100%, which Greenlight comfortably exceeded with 382% ROI four months into the campaign. True ROI considers all costs incurred in delivering each sale, incorporating any product returns, VAT, profit margins, marketing costs, and Greenlight’s fees.
The combined efforts of Greenlight’s SEO and PPC teams see New Look sitting comfortably at position 5 on the Hitwise rankings report, having increased traffic to the site by 101% in just 7 months. We also boosted their position from 27th to 18th most visited UK retail website according to the IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops List of the Top 50 UK e-retailers.
“One of the best things about Greenlight is that you know that you can relax in the knowledge that everything will be taken care of. They were brilliant right from the start, working as an extension of our team.... We really weren’t expecting this level of service – our account managers always go the extra mile, even if it means working to short deadlines or weekends, and the results speak for themselves”.
James Davey
Head of Online at New Look
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