Case Study
Mountain Dog sells high quality dog equipment and accessories from leading brands. The UK’s premier outfitters of quality dog equipment, accessories and apparel, you can find premium products from Ruffwear, Alcott, Hunter and more on the Mountain Dog website.
Mountain Dog is aimed at dog owners who love the countryside, and all of the adventures it holds. Whether it’s hiking, swimming or sailing, the safety of you and your trusty companion are of huge importance, and Mountain Dog is the place to pick up all of the equipment and clothing you need for you and your canine friend.
Mountain Dog came to us because they weren’t getting the results they needed from a previous agency. We took over all of their PPC activity across paid search, Google Shopping and paid social.
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.
There was a lot of duplication across the account. Over the course of a few months, 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 then 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.
In regard to Google Search, we made sure to cover all of the major brands that are sold on the Mountain Dog website. They built their business on selling one particular brand but wanted to become the leading supplier of other reputable brands. 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.
After just two months of managing Mountain Dog’s paid search account, they recorded the highest ever sales and revenue total since the business was founded and we continue to build on this success.
The main obstacle with regards to paid social was tidying up the account to make sure that sales figures were not being inflated. There previously hadn’t been any exclusions put in place against paid social campaigns meaning the number of sales being generated was likely to be inaccurate. Exclusions were added to prevent this from happening going forward. Whilst we knew this would look as if there had been a dip in sales temporarily, we also understand that it’s very important to have accurate data in order to inform future decisions around strategy and budget placement.
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.
Within just three months of taking over the account:
September 2022 vs September 2023: