How Boden reduced its paid search cost-per-click by 30% in just five months

Partnering with GOA, the retailer optimised its paid search advertising and unlocked real time insights that allowed it to reduce its CPC without negatively impacting revenue.

Originally a mail-order/catalogue business, Boden has fast become a British retail institution, operating online in the UK, US and beyond. Boden has achieved its e-commerce success by creating clothes for all generations that celebrate colour and print. It prides itself in not (and never) being about fast fashion and fads and is made to last. Recently, it unlocked a 30% reduction in CPC with no impact to revenue courtesy of independent insight from GOA.

The Challenge

Despite operating in the highly competitive and ever-evolving online fashion market, Boden has established a growing base of loyal customers. To ensure its continued success, maintaining brand loyalty and generating further awareness to put it front of mind among consumers, it was critical that Boden fully optimised its paid search advertising.

To effectively help unearth any actionable insights and improvements that could be made to optimise its paid search activity – for example, through cost-saving activities and optimisations – Boden approached GOA Marketing for support.

GOA was tasked with providing strategic consultancy on the paid search front and helping to gather sufficient data to generate actionable insights for Boden. GOA’s purpose was to help businesses to unearth opportunities for paid search advertising return on investment (ROI).

The Solution

GOA’s technology platform was used to build a three-way relationship with Boden, its agency, and the platform itself. Acting as an independent voice, the agency attempted to ensure that all thinking and actions were challenged and a clear understanding of any new industry-jargon was offered to the retailer.

With flexibility at its heart, GOA’s platform allowed Boden to set rules that enable the team to input the tool and the strategy together. The platform ensures that Boden has access to the extra bit of experience, and data points, which could help to save or make the retailer tens of thousands of pounds. By having the Boden team, the agency and platform working side-by-side, and the ability to change activity in real-time, the relevance and usefulness of Boden’s paid search activity was always cross-checked.

Alongside being a safety net, the GOA platform was used to leverage time savings that offer day-to-day efficiencies that benefit everyone, both internally and externally. This included the ability to unlock more interesting work across the entirety of Boden’s marketing organisation when it comes to paid search.

Results

Boden has been working with the GOA team for just over five months, yet, in this relatively short period of time, GOA has already helped to generate invaluable savings for Boden’s cost of traffic.

This includes a 30% reduction in CPC for its brand, without any impact on revenue, achieved through bid strategy testing and optimisation. This testing was inspired by the real-time and actionable insights the GOA platform provided in relation to CPC inflation.

Boden has also started to see some of its generic paid advertising activity pick up momentum - where it has seen the same levels of revenue come through.

Aside from the cost savings, the GOA platform has had a positive impact on the Boden team’s day-to-day activity. It has given the internal and agency teams a much more consistent view across all paid search activity. Historically this has been limited to insight based purely on paid search performance. As an independent third-party platform, GOA has been able to offer additional nuggets of information that can be essential for driving incremental demand and performance. This includes an increased efficiency in spotting specific purchasing trends or identifying ‘moments in time’ by highlighting the emerging patterns in data the Boden and agency teams are able to react to in real-time.

Jamie Irving, Performance Marketing Director and CRM Director at Boden, said: ” Working in partnership with GOA Marketing, together with our agency has given us another dimension to our search campaigns. It’s been easy, it’s been efficient, and it’s delivered on its promised results.”

Dan Chorlton, CEO at GOA Marketing added: “Online retail is a highly competitive marketplace, where trends change constantly and often unexpectedly. For a brand it can be a minefield of knowing when to act and when to ignore - the wrong decision can result in missed revenue opportunities or wasted time and spend. Working with Boden and it's agency to ensure that the retailer’s Paid Search Advertising is optimised to generate revenue growth and ROI where and when needed has been a pleasure.”