Chain Reaction Cycles (CRC), the world’s largest online bike store, worked with specialist paid search and display advertising agency, Net Media Planet, to develop an innovative new approach to increase online revenue whilst protecting profit margins.
Leveraging the new Image Ad Extension optimisation feature from Google, Net Media Planet developed and launched a new high performing paid search campaign and increased revenue by 200%.
Challenge
Chain Reaction Cycles offers the ultimate selection of products from the industry’s leading brands in all cycling disciplines. With a successful online marketing strategy, it has grown to become market leading in online retail.
However, in an increasingly competitive and challenging marketplace, the team were looking for a new way to increase sales across its premium products whilst protecting profit margins through paid search.
Approach
With set campaign budgets, the team at Net Media Planet explored how it could drive more online revenue efficiently from their existing paid search campaigns.
With early access to some of the latest products and features available from Google, Net Media Planet was able to quickly test brand new campaign optimisation features. One of these included the recently launched Image Ad Extensions.
We know that in some cases, particularly with high quality and expensive products, a text advert is just not enough to drive consumers to click through to the website.
Due to the highly visual nature of the products being sold by CRC, the Net Media Planet team believed that images shown above a text advert would enrich the user experience. By more accurately describing the product being promoted, for example the style of a bike, the colour of shorts – they would be able to achieve more impact with their paid search text adverts.
As an added bonus the adverts would also command more real estate on the search engine results page, which would enable CRC have more impact over its competitors.
The team worked with CRC to select a group of products that they believed would perform well through this approach. They then developed images designed to accurately describe the chosen product set, while also appropriately representing the brand.
With no guarantee that Image Ad Extensions will show on the text ads at all times, Net Media Planet then worked through a technical optimisation programme to help ensure that each campaign had the best chance of displaying image extensions every time a consumer made a relevant search query.
Results
As a result of the new optimisation feature, CRC was able to successfully differentiate itself from the competition on the search engine results page and drive more qualified traffic to the site as a result
Following campaign launch the CTR increased by +43%, and revenue increased by +200%, with overall profits increasing also.
The approach has opened the door to new and creative possibilities for CRC’s paid search campaigns, which help set their ads apart, while providing a more compelling way to promote their products. Following the successful execution of the campaign, the team are continuing to explore the use of Image Ad Extensions across other product sets.