How We Increased Paid Revenue by over 106% for Walker’s Shortbread

If you’ve ever found yourself craving a delicious shortbread cookie, save yourself time in the kitchen by indulging in Walker’s Shortbread instead. Walker’s Shortbread is a pure butter Shortbread brand founded over 125 years ago in a small Scottish village that has now grown to hold a vast variety of products while still staying true to their original values of quality and natural goodness. Walker’s not only pride themselves on producing the highest quality products to their original family recipes, but they use only the finest ingredients possible to obtain. Plus, they are extremely proud to carry a Royal Warrant for their Shortbread and Oat Crackers granted by Her Majesty the Queen herself! How sweet is that?

Now that we’ve established who Walker’s Shortbread is, let’s get into the marketing details - With the ever changing digital world, Walker’s Shortbread reached out to us for assistance in growing their online revenue within the United States. Here’s a look at how we were able to accomplish that together.

Goal 1: Launch a Profitable Facebook Ads Funnel

When it comes to eComm, the first paid advertising platform we turn to is Facebook & Instagram - Facebook & Instagram ads are the bread and butter of obtaining prospective customers who have not heard of your brand before, and nurturing them through your sales funnel until they purchase.

Before partnering with FFG, Walker’s Shortbread ran some Facebook Ads sparingly, but never built out a top to bottom funnel within the platform while utilizing the correct conversion campaign objectives. They were mostly focused on Engagement Campaigns to grow their Organic Platforms - which still does serve a purpose at times but what they truly needed to do was adjust their structure towards a Conversion Objective if they were to ever see profitable results.

Our first steps to setting up a profitable Facebook Ads funnel involved testing audiences and ad creative at each step of the user journey, following the below FFG funnel process:

• • Level 1: Targeting cold traffic (people who haven’t heard of Walker’s Shortbread before).

• • Level 2: Targeting users who’ve engaged with Walker’s Shortbread’ social media or visited the website (but have not visited any product pages).

• • Level 3: Targeting users who have viewed content (product page) on the website.

• • Level 4: Targeting customers who’ve added a product to cart or initiated checkout.

• • Level 5: Targeting past purchasers of Walker’s Shortbread

Step 1. Through testing, we can identify the audiences who are most likely to convert so that we only show our ads to those prospective customers.

• • Demographic & Geographic Targeting: Here we can target specific age ranges, gender, and locations so that we narrow down who we show our ads to.

• • Interest Targeting: We can also target people’s interests based on what they have shown interest in on Facebook and Instagram. In the case of Walker’s Shortbread for example, we tested users who’ve shown interest in “cookies” or “snack food”.

• • Retargeting: We can also retarget our ads to people who have engaged with our social media or website within a specific timeframe - i.e. people who have visited our site in the past 90 days, engaged with our social media (like, comment, share) in the past 60 days, or people who have added to cart but not purchased in the past 30 days.

• • Lookalikes: With the retargeting audiences above, we can also create “lookalike” audiences that can be used to target prospective customers with similar interests and demographics.

Step 2. Once we set the baseline on which audiences are most likely to convert at each stage of the funnel, we transitioned to creative testing to understand what kind of ads (i.e. statics, carousels, GIFs, videos, etc.) perform best for Walker’s Shortbread’ target audience.

Examples of Walker’s Ad Creative

Goal 2. Capture Intent with Google Search and Shopping Ads

Google and Facebook both have the ability to reach users at different stages along the sales funnel. Now that we’ve restructured the set up on Facebook ads as a way to capture purchases and obtain prospective customers for Walker’s Shortbread, we restructured their Google ads as well to better optimize consumer intent for retargeting customers.

We identified the most relevant and searched keyword opportunities for Walker’s Shortbread and launched into improved Search and Shopping Campaigns, so that the Walker’s Shortbread brand shows up for the users who are looking for them on Google.

The Results

Before partnering with FFG, the majority of Walker’s Shortbread’ revenue share came from retail and Amazon. By solidifying not only their Facebook strategy but their Google strategy as well, we were able to increase their paid revenue by over 106% year over year while only experiencing a 1.73% (or 0.12) drop in ROAS overall despite increasing ad spend by over 43%.

Are you currently struggling to scale your business online? Think that paid advertising can boost your revenue? Get in touch with us!