How we helped Mountain Dog achieve a 700% increase in paid social transactions

The Challenge

Mountain Dog came to us because they weren’t getting the results they needed from a previous agency, and competition was increasing from retailers selling the same brands. We took over all of their PPC activity across paid search, Google Shopping and paid social.

Goals

We devised an online advertising strategy covering key channels, working with the client to set goals and identify what had been going wrong for them in the past.

• Lower spend whilst maintaining healthy sales numbers
• Keep cost of sale percentage below 13%
• Increase ROI
• Increase website traffic

Strategy

Google Shopping

We spent a lot of time optimising Mountain Dog’s Google Shopping feed. When we took over the account, it became apparent that there hadn’t been enough focus on ensuring the shopping titles and descriptions were following best practices, which meant that Mountain Dog was missing out on a large volume of traffic, and ultimately sales. We also identified a lot of duplication across the account, so we worked to restructure this so that we could easily identify which products and areas of the business were driving the most profitable sales. We then began to segment these into their own campaigns and looked to scale them in line with the KPI’s.

We later moved away from traditional shopping campaigns and focused more on Smart Shopping to allow for extra visibility through the added display aspect of the feature. This meant we could begin using Google’s automated bidding to efficiently manage campaigns and scale up when performance was strong.

Paid search

We used Google Shopping to identify which products were selling well and then boosted those specific products with search campaigns. This gave us extra visibility in the SERPs.

Seasonality plays a huge role in Mountain Dog’s strategy, so covering the correct terms depending on the time of year is important. In order to do this effectively we worked closely with them to ensure we’re pushing relevant products depending on what was coming into season.

Paid social

Our strategy for paid social began with building a robust funnel to engage users through each stage of the purchasing journey. Prior to Venture Stream’s involvement, there was no structure in place and targeting was very limited.

We created specific ad sets for relevant, interest-based audiences. By adopting a granular structure, we were able to see which audiences were driving sales and at what cost, meaning we could calculate ROI. We also used a broad range of ad types to see what the best fit would be for each audience in order to concentrate our efforts on the ad types that were performing best.