Complete Acquisitions Overhaul

An entirely eCommerce furniture retailer, Swoon Editions' previous acquisition efforts depended on above the line print media. The natural shift in strategy was to expand into scalable digital mediums. With the introduction of a cohort based LTV methodology, I reprioritized budget towards those acquisition mechanisms that were able to prove their value.

Swoon Editions Promo
 

GROWTH FROM PPC

Swoon Editions AdWords

The first pockets of growth came from expansion into new types of AdWords campaigns. I brought all PPC activity in house and restructured our efforts to mirror a setup across 4 separate AdWords accounts. Our search account grew to over 17,000 keywords, our shopping account had each product grouped by category, our display account was split between generics and remarketing, and our GSP account targeted both generics and competitors. The setup was replicated into Bing and Yahoo for additional market penetration.

 

GROWTH FROM AFFILIATES

 

We then went about restructuring how the business interacted with affiliates. Our affiliates typically landed into one of two buckets: either content affiliate or voucher affiliate. Based on the cohort economics associated with each group, it made sense to spend our energy on nurturing relationships with content affiliates who would promote products on their site in an advertorial fashion.

 
Affiliate Promotion
 

SEO OVERHAUL

The eCommerce furniture industry is very saturated. While traditional paid acquisition channels had room for scaling, an even larger opportunity exists in the form of SEO. Because the existing website didn't give much priority to SEO, I undertook an initiative to strengthen our core proposition to search engines.

  • Changed site wide url structure.
  • Changed navigation layout grouping.
  • Added schema.org rich snippets.
  • Redefined all header tagging.
  • Initiated javascript cleanup.
  • Created keyword formula rules for alt tagging.
  • Compressed all images.
  • Revamped meta tagging.
 

GROWTH FROM CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION

 

To balance visitor acquisition efforts, we measured cohort conversion rates on a rolling basis. Merging acquisition responsibilities with conversion management removes perverse incentives to acquire poorly performing traffic. Conversion optimization was split between new list-member conversion and conversion to sale. Both levers were tested on an iterative basis.

 
Conversion Optimization
 

Over the span of 9 months visits nearly tripled, cost per visit dropped 61%, and business revenue more than doubled.

Visit Efficiency

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT 
ECOMMERCE ACQUISITION MARKETING

  • Things in a list are sorted by value.
  • Actions. Know what they are and who owns them.
  • Time is your enemy.
  • "Should" means "isn't."
  • You always need a pen.

TECHNOLOGY USED

Google AdWords, Affiliate Window, Ometria, Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Yieldify, Outbrain, Quantcast, Optimizely, Facebook Ad Exchange

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