Red Original eCommerce Case Study – 2020 Vs 2019

Fuel’s relationship with Red Original began in April 2019 with our scope of work including ongoing digital marketing services such as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), PPC Advertising (Pay Per Click), Graphic Design, and Digital Marketing Consultancy. Led by Fuel’s Digital Director, Alem Al-Khamiri, 2019 was the strongest year so far for Red Original. However, as we didn’t start working with them until 4 months into the year, we don’t think it’d be fair to take credit for any of that. Fortunately, the work we did in 2019 paid dividends in 2020 while providing a strong foundation upon which we were able to build throughout the year. 

Before we get to all the pretty numbers, let’s address the obvious elephant in the room; Covid-19. Like any major event, the Covid-19 pandemic presented businesses with numerous Threats and Opportunities. In the early days of the pandemic, Fuel worked closely with the in-house team at Red Original to make sure that we remained collectively agile enough to take advantage of any opportunities that arose while mitigating any negative impact as best we could. As a result, despite initially challenging conditions, we saw the website’s ecommerce performance go from strength to strength. Things only improved further as consumers began to shift their buying habits online, resulting in a stellar latter half of the year that’s going to cause quite the headache if we intend to beat 2020’s performance in 2021 (which we absolutely do so hopefully there’ll be a 2021 V 2020 case study next year).

In any case, we don’t want to bore you so we won’t go too much into the ‘how’ of it all, but we would like to make clear that the achievements detailed below are very much the result of teamwork and are a testament to what can be achieved when there’s real synergy between us and our clients. With that said, let’s take a look at what we were able to achieve with Red Original in 2020 compared to 2019, starting with Overall UK Traffic

Overall UK Performance

• 143.97% increase in Sessions
• 131.23% increase in Users
• 129.03% increase in New Users
• 0.63% decrease in Bounce Rate
• 6.17% increase in Pages Per Session
• 16.23% increase in Average Session Duration
• 437.57% increase in Online Revenue
• 264.61% increase in Online Transaction
• 49.45% increase in eCommerce Conversion Rate

While we’ve just mentioned a lot of lovely percentages (and believe us when we say that we wish we could share the actual figures too), the first thing we’d like to do is pat ourselves on the back for significantly increasing Sessions while maintaining the Bounce Rate. Generally speaking, a jump in traffic is accompanied by a Bounce Rate spike so being able to dodge that particular pit-fall makes us (mostly Alem) feel rather smug. Of course, the Red Original Team cared less about this and more about the significant rise in Overall Revenue and Transactions, which is fair enough I suppose.

One of our main goals throughout the year was to focus on growing the site’s Average Order Value, which we were able to achieve through the implementation of several Conversion Optimisation activities and thoughtful product positioning. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Red Original’s range of products is made up of items that inherently complement one another and their entire product development process is built around plugging any gaps they may discover. In short, while we like to think we’re exceptionally good at what we do, Red make our job marketing their business a lot easier than it otherwise could be.

Moving on, we’re now going to take a look specifically at Pay Per Click performance and how it contributed to the overall performance of the site. PPC campaigns for Red Original have been running since May 2018 with Alem beginning work on the PPC campaigns in April 2019. While not the flashiest approach, the first thing he did was optimise the existing campaigns so that they’d be running as efficiently as possible while he built out the account and developed new campaigns.

As a result of these optimisations, the mean-average cost-per-conversion was 49% lower between May 2019 to August 2019 than from January 2019 to April 2019. This was lowered even further over the next few months through various means (feed optimisation for Google Shopping, Daily Search Term audits of the Search Campaigns, etc.) to the point where the mean-average cost-per-conversion for the entirety of 2019 was 65% lower by the end of the 2019 than at the start.

We digress. Let’s look at the Overall PPC Performance in 2020 compared 2019 before we end up going off on another tangent.

Overall PPC Performance (Positions-Based Attribution)

• 433.81% increase in Overall Paid Conversions
• 44.62% decrease in Average Cost Per Click
• 24.43% increase in Conversion Rate
• 802.92% increase in Conversion Value
• 55.49% decrease in Overall Cost-Per-Conversion
• 280.05% increase in Conversion Value-Per-Cost (Return on Ad Spend)

The first thing we (Alem) would like to make clear is that all this was achieved with only a 137.58% increase in spend. This just goes to show that simply increasing your budget is not the key to success when it comes to Paid Advertising online. In fact, it should only be considered after you’ve exhausted every other optimisation opportunity. It’s a little more time-consuming and you may miss out on a few days worth of sales that you may or may not have otherwise made, but the results in the mid and long-term cannot really be argued with.

Once again, we won’t go into how we achieved all this in too much detail (we digital marketers are kind of like magicians, in that we don’t like to reveal our secrets) but we will show you how the different PPC Channels contributed to the overall success of the account.

PPC Search Performance (Positions-Based Attribution)

• 228.66% increase in Conversions
• 28% decrease in Average Cost Per Click
• 61.90% decrease in Cost-Per-Conversion
• 88.76% increase in Conversion Rate
• 427.27% increase in Conversion Value
• 321.13% increase in Conversion Value-Per-Cost (Return on Ad Spend)

PPC Shopping Performance (Positions-Based Attribution)

• 605.89% increase in Conversions
• 48.25% decrease in Average Cost-Per-Click
• 54% decrease in Cost-Per-Conversion
• 12.5% increase in Conversion Rate
• 1,254.43% increase in Conversion Value
• 317.11% increase in Conversion Value-Per-Cost (Return on Ad Spend)

PPC Display Performance (Positions-Based Attribution)

Display was primarily used for Brand Awareness, so it was optimised primarily for Impressions and Clicks rather than Transactions.

• 367.48% increase in Clicks
• 82.59% increase in Impressions
• 33.3% decrease in Cost

While focused more toward Brand Awareness, Conversions rose and the Cost-Per-Conversion increased:

• 50% increase in Conversions
• 55% decrease in Cost-Per-Conversion

Now that we have gone over PPC’s contribution in more than enough detail, let’s turn our attention to the Organic Channel to see whether the SEO activities we carried out had any effect (don’t worry, they did).Organic Performance

• 383.69% increase in Sessions
• 412.18% increase in Users
• 411.80% increase in New Users
• 6.87% increase in Bounce Rate
• 602.92% increase in Organic Revenue
• 345.15% increase in Organic Transactions

While the increased Bounce Rate is irritating, it’s not shocking considering the drastic increase in traffic. What’s more, it doesn’t even come close to offsetting the increased number of Sessions in any meaningful way, so I’m sure we’ll get over it.

As the basis for all the work we do on a website, Organic Performance is a strong indicator of a site’s overall health. A website that ranks well organically is likely to perform well in the Paid arena too, as Google relies upon many of the same factors to rank websites and web-pages organically as it does when calculating PPC Ad Scores and Quality Scores. Needless to say, the Organic Channel more than pulled its weight in 2020 and was the second highest contributing channel in terms of Online Revenue after the Paid Channel. Unlike its sister company, Red Paddle Co, Red Original didn’t benefit anywhere near as much from Branded Search, so we spent a lot of time and effort ensuring that the website ranked well for commercially-focused product terms. We supported these with strong creative content that complemented these keywords and highlighted the quality and versatility inherent in Red Original’s product offering.

Email Traffic

• 78.57% increase in Sessions
• 92.48% increase in Users
• 88.92% increase in New Users
• 4.37% decrease in Bounce Rate
• 245.23% increase in Email Revenue
• 159.96% increase in Email Transaction

Email marketing plays a significant role in Red Original’s continuing success. While the other channels we’ve mentioned are primarily introductory channels, Emails are used to add value, engage with previous customers, and generally communicate with those who are interested in what Red Original has to offer (whether that be products, information, or anything else). Social media plays a part in this too, of course, but Email Marketing allows the brand to interact more directly on a 1-2-1 basis. After the Organic and PPC Channels, Email was the third strongest driver of Revenue for the site, which just goes to show that you really cannot afford to overlook email marketing as part of an overall marketing mix.

We could look at more channels, but you’re no doubt as bored of reading now as I am of typing. Besides, if the data above isn’t enough to have piqued your interest, nothing else I could add is likely to either. In the end, while it’s nice to pat ourselves on the back in an easily accessible public space, the reason we wanted to share all this with you is in the hopes you’ll be like “Wow! I want me some of that.”. If having read the above you thought something along these lines, we’d love to hear from you and have a chat. Get in touch and let’s see how we’re able to help.

On that note, we’d like to leave you with a little quote from Red Original’s Ecommerce Manager, Luke Green, who when asked had this to say…

“Sorry in a meeting til 15:00 now. Anything urgent?”

No Luke. Not urgent at all.