SML Paints: PPC

SML Paints are a UK-based paint retailer specialising in marine, protective and decorative solutions.

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Brief

SML Paints wanted to increase their online sales through PPC. They had been running some search campaigns previously but didn’t fully understand what value they were driving to the business overall.

Challenges & Solutions

Shopping feed

With the website being a custom-built CMS, there were limitations on generating a shopping feed that could update automatically.

Product details

While information was pulling from the site into the shopping feed, some of the information was sparse.

Offline sales

SML Paints generated strong revenue via phone call conversions so understanding offline revenue was important to understand the full value of PPC.

Our Approach

Our approach began by modernising the structure of the PPC account and also introducing Google Shopping. Before investing in a third-party feed provider, we had to prove the value shopping ads could bring alongside search. We started by manually creating a shopping feed with the top 10 products and running a campaign on Google.

While this method was free, it was unsustainable with the volume of products on the site as well as being able to keep updated with availability. After running the shopping campaign for 3 weeks we were able to prove the return on ad spend and we found a third-party solution that could scrape the website for products and update our product feed with all inventory daily. This allowed us to scale our shopping campaigns.

Our next challenge was the information pulling into the feed. While we had the basics, the product titles lacked generic keywords and were limiting the auctions we entered. We optimised all product titles to include more rich keyword data as well as adding additional fields into the feed with information such as colour. After doing this we saw impressions increase but alongside this, conversion rate increased almost 200% as we were now entering more relevant and high-quality auctions.

Our final challenge was understanding the offline sales our PPC campaigns were driving as a lot of sales were converted over the phone after talking to one of the SML paint experts. We installed a call tracking platform that allowed us to capture the conversion data. We were then able to cross-reference this with SML paints sales data from their CRM and attribute sales revenue back to specific campaigns. This showed our overall ROAS from our campaigns as 120% higher than we were reporting with only online sales.

Results

0%

in conversion rate

0%

higher value from offline sales

+0%

year-on-year sale growth

Quote

“From the offset the team at Talking Stick have had an instinctive ability to really get under the skin of our business and understand precisely what needs to be done, always working within our set budget. It’s always reassuring to be working with a team of like-minded professionals.” Kevin Geake, General Manager