BACKGROUND
Afloral.com sells an expansive product line of high-quality artificial flowers, and has a strong online presence.
Previously, they were working with a software company to help grow their campaigns, but they weren’t growing—they were wilting.
With stagnant results and software that couldn’t help them strategize to expand their company, they switched to Omnitail in June 2019. See how we completely revamped their account management, drove profit, and helped their ecommerce business bloom.
4.5x
Increase in Profit
Year/Year
-13%
Decrease in Spend
Year/Year
5.6x
Improvement Margin %
Year/Year
INVESTIGATING THE ACCOUNT
Afloral.com had outgrown their agency’s cookie-cutter approach to account management. Coming from an agency that was 100% software, we expected some problems.
While Afloral.com was looking to expand, their agency was only trying to reach ROAS targets. Since the software couldn’t offer strategy solutions like our analysts, there were quite a few issues when we took over the account:
1. Lack of Product Segmentation
This is a common issue we see with clients without robust product segmentation: products are lumped together illogically or serve inconsistently, making it difficult to find and capitalize on trends in product performance.
In Afloral’s case, this was especially problematic as many of their products are seasonal. Lumping items with different seasonality together makes it almost impossible to effectively direct spend to those items most likely to sell at a given time. To solve this problem, we knew we needed to update their campaign structure.
2. One-Size-Fits All Solution
Afloral.com wanted to take advantage of the holiday shopping season, but their previous agency was struggling to adapt, as a result they were missing opportunities to grow. That’s why we worked with them to craft a custom plan of attack, that was tailored to their business.
3. Falling Revenue, Falling Profit
Finally, Afloral simply wasn’t seeing the results they’d hoped for.
Since their agency wasn’t tracking profit, there was no way to
maximize profit. Often, instead of using ROAS to aim for growth, agencies will spend less in order to make sure they always meet the ROAS target. This only benefits the agency and leaves companies like Afloral with zero growth. It was time for a customized, profit-driven strategy.
Omnitail's Advertising Strategy
Afloral’s PPC ads finally got the attention they needed to grow. We helped Afloral reorganize their campaigns, take full advantage of their products’ seasonality, and create a personalized game plan for Black Friday and the holidays.
An Updated Campaign Structure
The previous agency relied on just a few campaigns to advertise products. This limited segmentation and made it difficult to effectively drive profit. We expanded segmentation and mapped their product categories to custom fields in the product feed. This helped us more accurately measure the profitability of certain segments, and direct ad spend. In their KPI report, we tracked PLA performance by SKU, which showed the revenue generated by each product’s ads. This granularity helped us track which categories were doing well and also which products specifically were driving business. For their merchandising team, this helped them decide what to stock—and their marketing team gained valuable insights for other promotions.
Working with Seasonality
Afloral experiences a degree of seasonality that we needed to account for. Typically, their customers purchase products before they’re seasonally appropriate.
For example, fall-themed products start selling in the summer—so we adjusted bids earlier to account for this.
Custom Holiday Season Strategy
We created customized reporting to plan for Black Friday and Cyber Monday seasonality. Our reporting compared performance over that weekend year over year—allowing our analyst to see trends in performance over the weekend and respond to that. This yielded a major increase in efficiency and profit—but that isn’t the only benefit!
We can leverage this information again in the upcoming holiday season. Our analyst now can analyze data from last year, anticipate changes in performance, and make the most of the biggest shopping days of the year. With the help of a tailored strategy, Afloral stands to earn even more profit this year than last year!
The new approach paid off, and profit increased!
CONCLUSION
A big part of the value we bring to Afloral has been the time we take to strategize ways to help them grow. This is something that just can’t be as easily replicated by an automated system—it requires a dedicated analyst that can find key insights and apply them to campaign management.
In Afloral’s case this meant major improvement not just in the first year after signing on—but sustained campaign growth that has continued into the subsequent year!
