International Expansion Success Attributed to Attention to Detail

IMPAQT Case Study: Retail

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A top luxury retailer and long-time client of IMPAQT wanted to expand into the EU market. IMPAQT had been managing the client’s PPC campaigns in four different countries for several years, and we were looking forward to helping this client successfully enter another region.

The client not only wanted IMPAQT to set up PPC campaigns in these countries, but also build a successful holiday campaign plan in just four short months. In addition, the client allocated a limited budget so that they could get a feel for the opportunities in each country before committing significant spend.

QUESTION:

How could IMPAQT help the client enter eight new markets and build a holiday campaign in just four months on limited budget?

REVELATION:

We initially launched PPC campaigns with branded terms in English and in each country’s native language. After setting up campaigns in each country, we expanded into non-branded campaigns. Our initial strategy was to fund each campaign equally to get a baseline of performance across each country and each individual campaign.

We understood that by allocating the same amount of resources to areas showing different performance rates would spread each country’s spend too thin and leave pockets of untapped opportunity. Therefore, after a few months of testing, our account team did an analysis of each individual campaign and benchmarked them across all other EU campaigns.

Our team looked at CPCs, online revenue, branded vs. non branded activity, impression shares by campaign and conversions through product-related keywords to decide which countries and which campaigns were performing the best. We then suggested that instead of funding nonbranded keywords across all of these countries, the client should fund only branded terms in low-performing countries. This left more budget for non-branded campaigns in countries that were performing well.

We moved forward with shifting more daily budget to non-branded campaigns for the two highest performing countries - Italy and Germany. We understood that revenue may continue to be minor, but that this exposure would drive awareness of the client’s brand overseas and was likely to assist with branded conversions later in the purchase funnel, both online and offline. Also, for other campaigns with room to grow in impression share, we increased daily budgets and boosted bids to drive more impression volume.

The IMPAQT:

Information from the initial test, over a four-month time period, showed us exactly where to allocate budget during the holiday season. A combination of timing and customer preference, aligned with our strong analytics to help quickly identify strong performers and make budget changes, created a successful holiday strategy. The following successes were accrued during the holiday season, after our team’s suggestions were implemented:

Increase for Non-Branded Native Language Campaigns:

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