Nelly.com is an online store focused on fashion and beauty for young women, that since its launch in 2004 has grown to become one of the largest fashion brands in the Nordics. Acquired by the Qliro Group in 2007, Nelly now has a yearly turn-over of more than €120m and 300 employees, and serves customers in countries across Europe and beyond.
THE GOALS
Automate workflow to reduce man hours
Grow sales and lower cost of sale through bid optimisation
Easier updates for new brands and products
THE APPROACH
Automated campaign building via inventory keyword campaigns
Automated bidding with cross device performance to lower cost of sale
THE RESULTS
Decreased administration time by 50% (40h per week)
50% lower CoS
CTR increased by 58%
Responding to customer trends
Responding to changing consumer demands is one of the key challenges for businesses in the digital age, and there are few marketplaces where tastes change as quickly as they do in fashion. “Our success is based on a highly refined sensitivity for trends,” says Linus Andersson, Online Marketing Manager at Nelly.com, observing that Nelly’s own fashion labels allow the brand to adapt rapidly to customer needs. In an ever-changing product landscape, marketing plays an important role in connecting consumers with the latest must-have designs, but with so many options available to them, accurate and efficient targeting is essential. “Customers today have options, and these options are easier than ever to access,” explains Linus. “Unnecessary friction in the user journey leads to a lot of investment going for naught, especially with higher competition increasing paid search costs.”
As part of their efforts to mitigate this risk, early in 2016, Nelly began looking for opportunities to lower marketing costs and increase the efficiency of their paid search workflow. To achieve this they turned to Search Ads 360, porting over and restructuring campaigns and feeds, before exploring several of the system's most powerful features. Using Inventory Keyword Campaigns, Nelly were able to automate campaign building and utilise dynamic ad templates based on their inventory feeds. Alongside this, they implemented Shopping ads, which groups products with similar conversion performance to maximise return on investment, and activated Cross-Device bidding and attribution across their accounts.
Reaping the rewards of increased efficiency
With their new account structure in place, Nelly immediately began to see positive results, as Search Ads 360's automated features and tight integration with AdWords saw the amount of time spent on paid search maintenance and administration decrease by 50% in the third quarter of 2016, compared to the same period in the previous year. In addition to efficiency gains, Nelly’s campaign performance also improved, with click-through rate increasing by 58% and cost-of-sales reducing by 50% year on year.
“This is a new way of working with search marketing for us,” says Linus, “and it has enabled us to move our paid search entirely in-house. Next, we’re looking forward to using more business data to improve our bidding strategies, and to exploring channels like Shopping Ads, which will become increasingly influential on customer shopping behaviour."
