Case Study:
Salt Of The Earth
PPC / Ecommerce / DTC
Combining Google Ads & Meta Ads To Create A Holistic User Journey
The Project
Salt Of The Earth are a DTC retailer primarily selling deodorants which are the widest range of 100% natural deodorant on the market. When they approached us, they wanted to expand their D2C offering as they also sold their products through Amazon and Holland & Barrett.
This was a brand that needed both a sales push and a brand awareness piece in order to successfully grow through digital marketing. We paired a tightly run shopping campaign through Google Ads with a broader brand awareness piece through Facebook Ads to deliver substantial growth for Salt Of The Earth.
Our Approach
This project consisted of a two pronged approach – brand awareness and sales focused. This consisted of us really understanding the target audience and competition within the market.
Google Shopping – We utilised Google Shopping through Performance Max which allowed us to generate a lot of visibility for the products across a lot of different channels.
Feed Optimisation – At the start of the campaign, we undertook feed optimisation in order to give the Shopping campaign the best potential possible. This meant renaming the titles of the products & ensuring that the attributes were all in place and correct.
Competitor Research – This was crucial in the success of this campaign, understanding what competitors were doing & how this affected our performance allowed us to adapt our strategy to create a cost effective campaign.
Pricing Strategy – As Salt Of The Earth had a higher minimum order to be eligible for free shipping, we devised a new strategy which focused on selling the higher value products e.g. the refills. To do this, we split out the refills into their own campaign, so that the algorithm could learn to the different behaviours of new and returning customers.
Customer Match – Importing historical customer data into Google Ads, really supercharged the learnings within the account. Google was now able to understand what types of users were likely to convert & we could use this data to really hone in on our potential customers.
Key Areas
Paid Social
As we needed to increase awareness of the brand within the market, we partnered the Google Ads with Facebook & Instagram Ads. We knew that the target audience was a younger demographic who would likely have an interest in sustainability, environmental causes and vegan/vegetarianism as these were the main USPs of the brand.
This meant that with a targeted Meta Ads strategy, we would be able to generate brand visibility with our target audiences.
Whilst gathering data, we used link clicks as our conversion goal to track and drive more users to the site – this helped us build up remarketing lists. We then created audiences for “Add to Cart” as they have shown more intent and retargeted towards these users to help push them further through the conversion funnel.
With Instagram performing more effectively, we spent time designing more creatives to A/B test alongside different messaging within the ad copy.
Utilising this data, allowed us to remarket to these users who have been engaged with the ads through Google to drive more sales.
Ad Timing
One of our main challenges with Salt Of The Earth was due to them selling their products at Holland & Barratt – who also advertised their products through Google Ads. As H&B are a well known & trusted brand within the ecommerce space, this meant that users were more likely to purchase through them than an independent company – due to shipping, ease of communication & the fact that if anything was to go wrong, they could easily go into a store and resolve.
Holland & Barrett also had very frequent sales across their products on the site – Salt Of The Earth included. This meant that we were not only battling against brand trust but also prices and we noticed a direct correlation in a drop in sales when these discounts were live.
As a result of this, we gathered a list of dates that H&B would have sales, and turned down our Shopping Ads as we knew that we would not be able to compete in this space. Instead we focused our efforts on driving traffic through non-brand text ads – a place that they were not heavily targeting.
The Results
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