By moving from 'do it yourself' search marketing to working with trusted feed experts, Ambergreen, Citidrug.com increased web traffic by 1000% and e-sales by 1500%, delivering a return on investment of 15:1.
Background
Citidrug.com is the online channel of a traditional high street pharmacy. Established in 1948, Horsburgh Chemists is a well-known Edinburgh family business with eight shops across the city.
Launched two years ago, Citidrug.com sells generic and brand name vitamins and health supplements throughout the UK. A new brand identity was created so the online channel would be distinctly different from its parent company that would retain its well-established offline identity and corporate strategy.
After 18 months, Citidrug.com was clearly not fulfilling its potential. With high customer acquisition costs it was achieving a daily average of 50 unique users and sales of £20 per day.
Horsburgh explains: "From the start I believed that every marketing penny spent would be spent online. If your customers are online then you should market online. For 18 months we tried to optimise the site and run PPC campaigns ourselves but we could not generate the volume of traffic or sales that would achieve our business objectives. Ambergreen increased our daily web traffic by 1000% overnight."
Aims
The primary aim of Citidrug is not to educate or raise awareness of health and nutrition issues, but to sell. Citidrug desperately needed to increase the volume of buying traffic to the site while decreasing customer acquisition costs and maximising return on investment.
Because search marketing is highly targeted it allowed Citidrug to be extremely specific about the type of audience it brought to its site, ensuring that it would achieve its business objectives.
Execution
Ambergreen was selected because the company has a powerful reputation for specialising exclusively in search marketing. Its track record strongly demonstrates that it has the techniques and partnerships essential to create sophisticated campaigns that deliver high returns on investment.
Search engine trusted feed is a specialist technique professionally and successfully executed by only a handful of UK companies. Trusted feed involves a unique combination of search engine optimisation skills with cost-per-click accountability, allowing search engine spiders to spider large database sites and find products.
At the outset, Ambergreen analysed the market to identify primary targets for activity and the elements that would shape the campaign and ensure Citidrug.com achieved its aims.
This scrutiny established the size of the market, the potential return on investment and the thousands of critical key words and phrases, including common mis-spellings, which would deliver the maximum return on investment for Citidrug.
Crucially, Ambergreen also assessed the site to determine the profitability of the individual products offered for sale. Return on investment was calculated for each product including the cost of the keyword advertised, the click through rate and the subsequent sale. This analysis is now used to drive Citidrug's merchandising strategy and eliminate the non-profitable products from the website.
Tino Nombro, Ambergreen's Managing Director comments "Citidrug is a classic 'clicks and mortar' story: a business model ideally suited to succeed online. Search marketing can be done in-house but it needs to be executed by professionals to make a real impact. Trusted feed is the ideal technique for a large database site like Citidrug and is a specialist skill that Ambergreen can deliver with great results. It has been a pleasure to implement the search marketing campaign that has allowed Citidrug to fulfil its potential."
Results
By moving from 'do it yourself' search marketing to working with trusted feed experts, Ambergreen, CitiDrug.com increased web traffic by 1000% and e-sales by 1500%, delivering a return on investment of 15:1.
Ambergreen has driven high volumes of relevant traffic: customers with a mindset to purchase that know exactly what they want and will buy.
Overnight Ambergreen took Citidrug from 1500 to 15000 unique users per month and targets the large markets of rural communities in Scotland and the south of England. In addition, expats living in Germany, Italy and Portugal, are becoming an increasingly significant market for the Citidrug campaign.
Analysis of the campaign has also been used to shape Citidrug's merchandising strategy and eliminate the non-profitable products from the website.
Citidrug plans to launch a new website which has been designed specifically to increase conversion rates and so capitalise on the traffic driven to the site by Ambergreen. Enhancements to Citidrug.com include improved navigation, price comparison calculator, repeat purchase reminder. The new site will allow Citidrug to capture data in an intelligent database that is growing daily and will be used to target customers with relevant offers and reminders to stock up on their staples.
The account continues to be run from Ambergreen’s headquarters in Edinburgh, headed up by Grant Whiteside, one of Europe’s leading search marketing specialists. Ambergreen is pioneering search engine marketing as the key to successful search marketing and occupies a unique position in the market because of its track record, technical expertise and commitment to ethical marketing.
Horsburgh concludes: "Finding Ambergreen was great. It is exactly the right company to do a good job for us. Ambergreen give me exactly the kind of traffic I want: buying relevant traffic."
