Challenges
No Trading History: As a start-up, Charles and Ivy had no trading history, meaning everything had to be created from scratch based on available data, which wasn’t always accurate.
Limited Internal Resources: The client had a small marketing team at launch, with limited resources available to provide support.
Premium Pricing: Charles & Ivy’s products are high-consideration purchases with high average order values (AOVs), compared to long-established competitors with thousands of customer reviews.
Revenue Dependence on Select SKUs: Despite offering over 200,000 SKUs, the majority of revenue came from a small proportion of these products.
Attribution Issues: The customer journey, including sample packs, store visits, and a significant proportion of revenue generated by phone, made effective attribution challenging. Both paid social and search teams claimed credit for revenue, with incorrect server-side tracking compounding the problem.
Data Quality Issues: Raw product data from Shopify was incorrect, leading to Google auto-updating product prices before the Google Merchant Centre rejected the ads.
APJ Digital Solution
1. Data & Analytics
To ensure Charles & Ivy’s technical implementation was optimal, we focused on key technical elements that feed into ad algorithms:
Conversion Tracking: Set up and tracked key e-commerce events, including checkout steps using Shopify Checkout Extensibility. Initially upgraded to Shopify Checkout Extensibility and Shopify Checkout Extensibility v2 when launched. These included full-funnel conversions and conversion tracking monitoring setup.
First-Party Data Strategy: To compliantly recover data lost to ad blockers, browser tracking prevention, and cookie restrictions, we:
Configured, maintained, and optimised server and client-side Shopify conversion tracking using Google Tag Manager. Initially using Google Cloud Platform before migrating to Stape after a couple of years.
Audited the existing setup and implemented GTM server-side tracking, following best practice resources, including using Stape’s cookie keeper, allowing for increased cookie duration and reduced impact of ad blockers.
This resulted in 30.88% of requests being recovered from tracking prevention and 1.14% from ad blockers.
Configured Google Ads and Google Analytics enhanced conversions, ensuring that when a user is logged in to a Google product but rejects cookies, conversion tracking remains compliant.
Set up and optimised first-party data tracking, creating customer lists to be sent to advertising platforms for better targeting of returning users without relying on cookies.
Consent Optimisation: Managed the migration to Google Consent Mode v2 setup, including consent banner optimisation.
Google Analytics Solutions: Implemented end-to-end Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 solutions, including implementation, data warehousing, and customised dashboarding to ensure seamless data collection and reporting.
Product Analytics: Provided recommendations and implementation plans for customer data platforms and product analytics tools. Also implemented offline conversion value tracking, linking phone conversion values back to marketing channels and enabling sentiment analysis on calls.
Data Architecture & Engineering: Tailored a data warehouse solution for marketing analysis, encompassing everything from data sourcing to visualisations, with comprehensive support and data quality audits to ensure reliable insights for informed marketing decisions.
Advanced reporting and insights: Provided insights and data unavailable on the platforms with the Custom Looker Studio reporting solution running off our data warehouse, creating visually appealing and informative dashboards using Google Looker Studio and BigQuery.
- To extract the required insights we built out data pipelines from different sources with varying naming conventions and columns and then sent this to a Google Bigquery data warehouse. As part of this, we transformed the product data so the revenue figures are correct, solving the issue caused by the raw data received from Shopify being incorrect.
- This included weather tracking, reporting and alerts and analysing the impact this has on demand and conversion rates.
- Implemented sentiment tracking, creating a custom solution to monitor customer reviews and used machine learning to tag the sentiment of these reviews and then used this data analysis, benchmarking and alerts against key competitors and analysed the impact this has on demand, and conversion rates.
Product Feed: Taking the raw product data from Shopify for over 200,000 products and transforming this into a highly optimised and robust feed that can then be sent to the ad platform. In the first 12 months due to an issue with the pricing data this included extracting product data for thousands of products using custom Python code so we can use this for product feed prices while the site is being updated.
Google shopping feed: We optimised over 200,000 products, including using custom labels to split our bestsellers and newly added products so we could push the budget behind these within the ads platforms.
2. Paid Media Strategy & Management
Once robust data collection and product feeds were in place, we could then optimise media budgets across Google and Bing Ads:
Strategy: Created the initial test and learn strategy, refining the ad account structure and budgets as they scaled and the PPC landscape evolved, including managing the sunset of Google Ads Smart Shopping and cookie changes.
Account Organisation: Organised accounts to efficiently report on brand vs. non-brand performance and product category performance.
Bespoke PerformanceMax Reporting: Provided data hidden from the interface, such as ROAS across Google products (Search, Shopping, Display, and YouTube), and brand vs. generic performance.
Budget Management: Managed a seven-figure annual Google and Microsoft Ads budget, including Search, Shopping, PerformanceMax, Demand Generation Display, and YouTube, increasing from £40,000 in month one to consistently over £100,000 per month by month 12. Peak months saw a media spend of £190,000.
We optimised budgets across brand and non-brand, ensuring PerformanceMax didn’t cannibalise performance by running branded search and shopping campaigns to gain control over the brand budget.
Google CSS: We launched a dedicated CSS for the client with a limited list of other retailers, allowing us to control which retailers were displayed, ensuring no competition and saving up to 20% on click costs.
3. Consultancy
We also…
Offered strategic and operational support working with internal and external teams including paid social agencies
Liaised with internal and external teams including paid social agencies
The results
Grew sales profitably from £0 per annum to over £29m in under three years.
Become UK market leader, with the highest customer satisfaction scores in its category.
Revenues continue to increase year-on-year, maintaining profitability through effective budget allocation and fast decision-making.
They’ve definitely got their finger on the pulse as Google’s constantly changing. They didn’t just execute—they guided us, identified gaps in our strategy. They really care about delivering results. APJ Digital is extremely knowledgeable and they’re always there on call, which was important to us.”
Founder
Charles and Ivy