Notonthehighstreet.com was established in 2006 by Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish, who decided to share their passion for unique products with others, creating a marketplace for small creative businesses where shoppers could find effortlessly original and handmade items.
Today notonthehighstreet.com has over 3,700 small British businesses registered with their marketplace, offering more than 80,000 products between them.
Notonthehighstreet.com began with just £70,000, yet they have since received four rounds of VC funding (most recently from Fidelity Growth Partners Europe (FGPE) in 2012) and to date the company has accumulatively contributed around £200m to the UK economy.
The Multi-channel Plan
Wanting to increase their online brand visibility, they decided to incorporate their products into Google Shopping and within paid search listings, so that their products would be more efficiently integrated into Google Search, becoming more prominent and successful in search results.
John Ashton, Digital Marketing Executive from notonthehighstreet.com, explains why they chose to work with FusePump on their online channel marketing campaigns.
“FusePump offered us a great solution that allowed us to service both the Google channels that we use, and our affiliates, with ease and confidence. They were competitively priced, provided prompt and detailed communications and great technology.”
Multi-channel Integration
FusePump have been working with notonthehighstreet.com for almost two years. During this time, they have provided notonthehighstreet.com with high-quality data feeds which have helped them improve their e-marketing services, including product feed integration with PPC search (with Stellar Search), affiliate marketing (with LinkShare), retargeting (with Struq) and international Google Shopping.
Each online channel requires a dedicated product data feed. This is mapped against the required channel integration criteria and then optimised for use in each specific channel.
“FusePump have provided us with a product that we can trust, and that’s the most important thing. It means that we can be confident that whoever accesses our product is getting the best, and most relevant, information. It offers quality, reliability and peace of mind.”
FusePump extract comprehensive product data, which is of an extremely high quality as it incorporates all product attributes from an e-commerce site. By including these additional features and refreshing the data at least once a day, FusePump have enabled notonthehighstreet.com to be more creative with its data and achieve better results across the channels.
For example in the data feed used for PPC search, being able to feature all attributes within the data feed helps the notonthehighstreet.com adverts to rank better in search results for long-tail keywords.
Meanwhile, for Google Shopping, FusePump have made sure that all notonthehighstreet.com products are correctly classified and categorised to comply with Google’s data feed specifications and direct more high-quality web traffic to the notonthehighstreet.com website.
Results
Google Shopping
The enhanced data feed optimisation and mapping that FusePump provide has helped notonthehighstreet.com to steadily increase their Google Shopping click through.
By August 2011, consumer click-through for notonthehighstreet.com had already exceeded the highest number of clicks from 2011. The click-through then continued to increase for the rest of year, culminating with a total of more than 20,000 clicks by the end of December last year.
Despite the changes to the Google Shopping channel in February 2013, notonthehighstreet.com has continued to see impressive growth in conversion rates from their product integrations in this channel.
“We were initially concerned that the changes would have a negative effect on our channels, both harming SEO and increasing the CPA of paid search,” explains John.
“But with the help of the FusePump product feed, we instead experienced a smooth transition with no negative effects. The team at FusePump made sure that the feed was completely ready for the changes and I don’t think we could have had a more stress-free changeover.”
In fact, since the changes, notonthehighstreet.com has seen positive effects, including a 35% increase in their ROI due to PLAs on their AdWords account.
Sam Hodges, Head of Client Services at FusePump, explains why the changeover was so straightforward:
“As soon as we heard that Google Shopping was changing, we made sure that we were prepared. FusePump took great care to correctly categorise and classify every single notonthehighstreet.com product before the changes were implemented. By doing this, we not only made sure that each product listing complied with Google’s data feed specification, but also helped to better match the listings to consumer search terms, which helps to improve the quality of redirected web traffic.”
Paid Search Automation
The additional attributes that FusePump extract from the main notonthehighstreet.com site have also helped to improve the paid search results for long-tail keywords.
Notonthehighstreet.com is now able to include all of its products within the product feed for its pay per click (PPC) adverts, which are managed by Stellar Search. Each of its campaigns, of which there are more than 40, targets a separate site category through the product feed. Since implementing search automation, notonthehighstreet.com has seen a 15% uplift in CTR via its paid search channel.
“Stellar Search has been managing the PPC campaigns of notonthehighstreet.com for over four years and it’s going really well,” explains Stelios Pardalakis, Managing Director, Stellar Search.
“Google Product Listing Ads have been a great success for us and this is because of the quality of the FusePump feed, which ensures that all of the information we have is accurate and up-to-date. The results that we have show that a high-quality feed can really make the difference in paid search campaigns and between us we have helped notonthehighstreet.com achieve these great results.”