Breaking the Brand Barrier
The account was stuck in a legacy, outdated mold - spending around 90% of budget on brand text & LIA ads. Performance was predictable but did not deliver incremental results that the client needed. While brand holdout tests were conducted, inconclusive results and executive-level hesitance kept us stuck. Until…
+26M
Store Visits QoQ
+$18M
Quarterly Incremental Revenue
-14%
CPC QoQ
Turning Point & Challenge
After projecting brand savings and incremental sales from pulling back on brand - we received executive buy-in. Within the first week, 25% of brand budget was shifted to shopping. In the short-term, this caused performance drops, raised flags & put us at risk for budget cuts. So, we created a comprehensive strategy to transform our search business.
The Strategy
Without giving all of the secret sauce, we looked to the following shifts to unlock incremental performance:
Unleashing brand efficiency
Embracing a Total Search approach - combining SEM & SEO strategy
Integrating advanced signaling to understand omni-channel relevance
Results
In a quarter, industry CPCs surged 39%….while ours decreased 14%. With our advanced signaling, the shifted budget into LIA unlocked over $18M in incremental revenue - $11M of which came from online revenue. This shift was more than just optimization, it was transformation.