Rodan + Fields | Case Study
Account Restructure & Messaging Improvements
New Customer Growth.
Before takeover, Four15 Digital aligned with the Rodan + Fields digital team on prior paid search testing and results, data attribution and instrumentation, and the goals that would prove to the executive team that paid search could drive new customer acquisition. In this way, new strategies and efforts could be tracked and analyzed, and the results could be measured and replicated.
At Four15 we believe that both success and failure provide opportunities to learn and improve. However, the existing campaign setup would prevent the ability to see or measure any potential success, removing the ability to learn and improve even in failure. For this reason, our first and most immediate goal was to set up the account with all possible advantages to drive new customer sales profitably with the budget available. If that failed, then we would have successfully tested SEM and concluded it was not a viable option for Rodan + Fields. If our structure did succeed in driving new customer sales, then we would have a strong foundation for growing those conversion numbers.
The original account setup was disorganized, combining brand and non-brand terms in the same ad groups, and using ad copy that was irrelevant to the search queries being made. In addition, irrelevant and expensive keywords were being run that quickly spent daily budgets and prevented proper testing. Four15 sought to optimize these systems and ensure every marketing dollar provided the greatest possible return on investment.
Four15 Digital took over active management of paid search accounts at the start of June 2018. Our immediate priorities were to:
Priorities were accomplished in three cohesive phases:
We began by analyzing historic query performance, identifying those terms which had shown success and ensuring they were neatly organized and served relevant ad copy. We also identified negative keywords, terms we did not want to appear or were causing incorrect keyword-to-ad mapping, and built robust negative keyword lists that could be shared across campaigns.
Our secondary action was to expand query coverage across brand terms. The original campaign structure failed to protect the company’s brand because it did not include robust keyword sets (or negative keywords) related to product brand names.
The result was that competitor ads and organic listings ran rampant on the search engine results page, effectively pushing Rodan + Fields organic listings for brand searches below the fold. We expanded these terms to ensure full product query coverage and push competitors from the top spots on both paid and organic listings.
Finally, we re-wrote every single piece of ad copy in the account. Rodan + Fields has a wide range of products which have very important differences in usage and results. Therefore ad copy had to speak to the needs of the customers and take them to the correct product. There was no “one-size-fits-all” solution. We created custom copy for every ad group and built out ad extensions (sitelinks, callouts, phone number, promotions, structured snippets) to ensure customers had every option available to them to see the most relevant content that addressed their skincare needs.
The month of June was spent instrumenting our new campaign structure, expanding keywords, adjusting bids where needed, and monitoring the search query report for new keywords and negative keywords to be added to the account. We also continued to expand campaigns for new product launches and non-brand keywords.
The result of our efforts was that within one month, from June to July, total sales from paid search increased by 40% while CPA only grew by 9%. New customer sales grew by 24% and new customer CPA grew by 23%. Because of these results, Rodan + Fields doubled down on their investment in paid search.
We successfully grew total sales from paid search and also had a positive impact on new customer sales.
Armed with our new data and learnings, we knew we could further improve paid search performance.
We continued our optimization efforts of query analysis and expansion, and the results were even better than expected: within the first three months we were able to increase new customer transactions by 39% while also keeping CPA below goal (50% below the break-even point).
