Watch Shop is an online retailer specialising in designer watches, jewellery and sunglasses. Established in 2007, it was acquired by the UK’s largest luxury jeweller, Aurum Holdings Ltd, in 2014. Today, Watch Shop’s key business challenges are to overcome competition in a demanding area of retail and grow market share.
About Watch Shop
Designer watches, jewellery and sunglasses
Acquired by Aurum Holdings Ltd in 2014
Goals
Tackle increasing competition within Shopping, a key format for Watch Shop
Improve new user acquisition budget efficiency
Approach
Implemented Similar Audiences
Used bid modifiers to ensure good coverage across relevant users
Results
11% higher conversion rate and 11% greater average order value among similar audiences than when no audience was defined
Shorter click path
79% year on year revenue increase
Watch Shop partnered with NMPi to uncover tactics to ensure they were spending their budget on showing ads to the most relevant users. NMPi identified that for Watch Shop, a retailer that sees substantial peaks in performance during gifting periods, a strategic bidding strategy for new visitors to the site was essential.
The agency had already identified site-level audiences to target with Shopping campaigns – such as previous site visitors, basket abandoners and so forth – as these act as useful signals as to how potentially valuable a user is for Watch Shop. However, it was impossible to estimate how valuable a new visitor to the site could be, and to adjust Watch Shop’s bids accordingly.
The team decided to introduce Similar Audiences to see if this approach could help improve the budget efficiency on users who were yet to interact with the site, and thus represented the most potential for Watch Shop. Similar Audiences works by looking at data about a brand’s existing remarketing audiences, and then finds new and qualified consumers who have shared interests with that audience.
"We were very impressed with the results of the work NMPi achieved with Similar Audiences. As we moved into our peak trading period they looked at how we could maximise the performance of our upper-funnel coverage with the use of data and Similar Audiences."
– Craig Firth, Head Of Digital Marketing, Watchshop
Analysing Watch Shop’s Shopping campaigns, NMPi compared the performance of the Similar Audiences to users who were not defined in any audience. They observed an 11% increase in conversion rate and 11% increase in average order value, indicating that the lookalikes were indeed more valuable than those new visitors not defined in an audience.
They also saw a shorter click path for Similar Audiences than those users who were not defined in an audience, supporting the hypothesis that the Similar Audiences were in a frame of mind to purchase and that they were being captured at a lower point in the conversion funnel. By implementing Similar Audiences, NMPi has been able to combat the competition within Shopping, a key part of the Watch Shop account. Overall, the brand has recorded 79% year on year increase in revenue.
