Background and Challenges

In summer, 2019, we were appointed by a luxury start-up brand to help with their SEO and digital marketing across their UK, US and Australian websites. Unfortunately, as signed an NDA, we can’t tell you the name of the client. What we can tell you is that the brand is a home interior brand and the average sale is £9,000, they have no shops and sell exclusively online.

Our brief was simple. 1) Increase search engine ranking and 2) Experiment with digital marketing, find the channels that work and generate a positive ROI.

They had used Instagram advertising before and we knew that for every £1 they spent they would make £19 in revenue. The client had also experimented with Google Ads and was spending a limited amount of budget through Google.

We thought that finding an audience for £9,000 items would be tricky. But you would be very surprised.

The Results

SEO

Ranking websites for that sell luxury products is actually no different to any website. We started with the basics – content and links. Here are the results to date compared with the same period prior to us working on the website:

Here’s a breakdown of enquiries generated in the last quarter of last year via organic search:

As you can see, the total cost of SEO for the client was £16,945 for the quarter (based on our 2019 day rate) and generated 541 enquiries for a cost-per-enquiry of £31.32.

Google Ads

Search Ads: Our approach to the Search Ads campaign was multi-faceted. In terms of targeting, we exclusively targeted the most affluent postcodes in the countries we were targeting. We targeted some generic terms e.g. ‘luxury’ and we also targeted competitors.

Display Ads: We knew from the Instagram activity that communication that was visual in nature would appeal to the audience. Our display activity was split into two; digital display and retargeting.

The average cost-per-enquiry for Google Ads prior to our involvement was around £100.

As you can see from the above numbers, the total cost to the client for Google Ads was £32,454.58 and this generated 524 enquiries for a blended cost-per-enquiry of £61.94.