Caviar Passion PPC case study

Client

Caviar Passion is a 10-year-old online retailer which is revolutionising the caviar sector in France and soon in the rest of Europe by offering lower prices and focusing on online retail rather than traditional distribution chains.

Thanks to its competitive pricing and high-quality products, the company aims to democratise caviar and reach out new untapped audiences.

Q4 2020 Campaign objective

The primary objective was to double paid search revenue over the black Friday Christmas period versus 2019 whilst maintaining our Return on Ads Spend above target to ensure a positive cash flow.

The secondary objective for this campaign was to test new channels and formats to identify new areas for growth for the business. Historically all biddable investment had been allocated to paid search and shopping with no investment on display or social.

Strategy

To reach our objective we developed a consumer centric strategy covering all stages of the conversion journey using a mix of channels and formats.

Firstly, to increase reach and build our retargeting pool we build keyword based custom audiences to target “home chef” and “party entertainers” across the Google Display Network using image ads.

Secondly, we targeted in high value market audiences across search and shopping targeting specific keywords with a very aggressive bidding strategy to saturate search interest. Reach across the search network was further increased by targeting non caviar audiences by leveraging other product categories (smoked salmon, king crabs).

Finally, we used retargeting across the Google Display Network and Facebook to converter website visitors and cart abandoners.

Execution

The campaign was launched on the 1st of November and finished on the 31st of December, a key period for luxury food retailers representing 90% of yearly revenue. Each period had a unique set of offers and creatives as well as different ROAS target.

To help drive awareness and consideration, a prospecting display campaign was launched at the start of November to engage high value prospects and build a remarketing pool to be retargeted through search, shopping, display and social later in the campaign.

Custom audiences were built using keyword targeting people who searched terms which were indicatives that they could fit one of our client’s persona (home chef, entertainers etc.).

For maximum efficiency, all bidding was done manually to allow for greater control of the bids and of the budget. This was particularly important considering the short span of the campaign with huge variation of interest and performance throughout the period.

Daily incremental reductions in maximum CPCs helped reduced the CPC for display to just 5p, generating a huge volume of qualified clicks extremely cost efficiently. Thanks to this approach ROAS was very strong for prospecting display.

To maximise the volume of conversions the entire search and shopping account were restructured to implement best practice and allow for maximum reach.

For search, a brand-new structure campaign structured following the method Hagakure was implemented for launch. This new agile, algorithmic friendly structure allowed for more efficient budget management and bid optimisation. With more data coming through each

item the algorithm was able to better optimise spend, allowing to scale the activity with revenue for generic tripling year on year whilst maintain efficiency. To maximise revenue, a search campaign was set up to target direct competitor and e-retailers which brought valuable incremental traffic to the website.

For Shopping, new Smart Shopping campaigns were launched to replace the standard shopping campaigns and allow for more reach across the search and display network. The new format proved exceptionally successful generating triple the volume from 2019.

To increase volume further and reach new audiences, new Smart Shopping campaigns were launched to advertise non-caviar products such as king crabs which helped tapped into new audiences not directly interested in caviar.

Finally, we used dynamic retargeting across the Google Display Network and Facebook to reengage cart abandoners and website visitors.

Results and evaluation

With a strict budget, we manage to triple revenue year on year far exceeding targets for 2020. Despite scaling the activity ROAS was maintain throughout the period above our target for the whole campaign.

Impressively, whilst only 10 years old Caviar Passion achieved more than 30% click share on search and shopping dominating a fragmented paid search landscape and taking the mantle of Petrossian has market leader within the category.

This media strategy also helped Caviar Passion build the category democratising caviar and reaching new audiences across the display and search network, as well as across social platforms, who might never have bought caviar otherwise.

The campaign was shortlisted for “Best Retail Campaign” and “Best Integrated Campaign” at the 2021 European Search Awards.