In the past year, we’ve experienced extraordinary macroeconomic movements which have forced retailers to shift their strategies completely. Business owners and investors are now making a u-turn from growth to profitability.
In parallel with these macro movements, retailers are also struggling with increased competition and lower margins. Our retail clients working with Google Shopping account for 40% of total revenue on average, in some cases, the Google Shopping share exceeds 60% – which also means that the largest media investment goes towards this channel.
The fastest way to increase profitability would be to cut the marketing spend, this strategy either leads to lower order volumes, less focus on upper funnel activities, or a combination of the two. Lower order volumes create a situation where your fixed costs increase in relation to each order and a lower focus on brand activities makes your business more reliable on lower funnel activities such as Google Shopping.
To summarize, the new circumstances create an equation that doesn’t really add up long term.
The solution? Let’s have a look into Bluebird’s case for Parfym.se to get an idea of how to improve your marketing strategy going forward. The case was even shortlisted as one of the best cases within retail e-commerce in the European Search Awards last year.
Parfym partnered up with Bluebird having two things in mind. Profit and growth. An equation that rarely adds up. But by shifting from traditional ways of optimizing, reporting, and analyzing top-line revenue towards profit and instead adjusting Parfym’s development towards profitable growth – the results were impressive.
Kuvio.io was used to set up advanced reporting on profits across the entire channel and marketing mix, which allowed us to easily shift budgets accordingly. This, alongside real-time profit optimization in Google ads, allowed us to focus on maximizing incremental profits after advertising spends instead of maximizing revenue with a given return on ad spend.
The performance of the strategic shift towards profits brought in extreme increases in efficiency that have enabled us to invest in further growth. The profit bidding and reporting uplift from Generic Search and Google Shopping are highlighted below, overall performance excluding the two prior channels is highlighted within parentheses.
Jonas Häggqvist, CEO at Parfym.se said the following about the partnership:
“Kuvio.io has really enabled us to optimize our campaigns and steer our marketing budgets toward what matters the most, profits. Being able to follow critical business KPIs:s in real-time has also made the Kuvio reporting solution our primary source of truth when it comes to daily, weekly, and monthly performance reviews"
In essence; whether you’re looking to future-proof your marketing strategy or shift your focus toward profitability – we’re here to guide you through it.