Summary
ACHIEVING THE PERFECT BALANCE VIA ONESEARCH In recent years, shoppers in Indonesia showed a growing reluctance to buy goods from online marketplaces due to the fear of receiving fake products. Hence, Converse launched a Direct-to-Commerce website to divert sneaker enthusiasts to Converse.ID. Since search is the most important channel for discoverability and conversions, we we employed a strategic blend of SEO and SEM, called 'OneSearch' framework, to win on SERP while maintaining efficiency.
Challenge
Client Objective: With its D2C website in Indonesia, Converse was all set to provide its products directly to customers. The objective was now to protect its customer base from the counterfeit market while also improving the sales conversion. Problem Statement: Thanks to the rising internet penetration, the Indonesian digital economy witnessed a boom in the past two years. As per Global-Web-Index report on Indonesia, 63%+ shoppers use search engines to discover new brands/products. The search volumes of footwear-related terms like "Sepatu Kets"(Sneakers) are seeing 22% Year-on-Year (YoY) growth in this Southeast-Asian country. Since Converse is popular across the globe, we observed positive search trends for "Converse All Star", "Converse Chuck Taylor", and "Converse Run Star" at 49%, 22% and 30% YoY growth, respectively. Upon launching its website, Converse was able to reach and resonate with a lot of its customers in Indonesia within a short span of time. This gave us an opportunity to target a larger audience on search. However, with multiple large marketplaces bidding on Converse keywords, we experienced cut-throat competition. Achieving our objectives while also maintaining cost efficiency seemed to be quite the challenge. Yet, it was one that we were willing to live up to.
Objective
Converse enjoys immense popularity as an athleisure brand globally. However, in recent times, this American brand noticed a huge gap in its online and offline sales in Indonesia. While Converse performed exceedingly well in retail stores, it barely converted any potential buyers on e-commerce marketplaces like Shopee and Lazada. Recent trends have shown a growing reluctance to buy big-ticket items online due to the thriving counterfeit market in Southeast Asia. In fact, the sale of fake goods expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic and led to a loss of faith in shoppers. It now became imperative for Converse to protect its customer base from counterfeit markets. Hence, in November 2021, the brand launched its direct-to-commerce website in Indonesia with Mitra Adiperkasa Active group (MAP). In this given scenario, Performics India spearheaded the digital marketing campaign to divert sneaker enthusiasts in Indonesia to Converse.ID.
Strategy
Converse Indonesia wanted to reach maximum shoppers interested in sneakers, while also protecting them from fake products sold on the internet. However, with intense competition on SERP, achieving our client's goal while maintaining cost efficiency through paid or organic strategies alone was challenging. Hence, integrating SEO and SEM became crucial. OneSearch is a robust framework pioneered by Performics to leverage the effects of Organic and Paid Search for holistic budget management and maximised business outcomes. Phase 1: Identifying Synergistic Effects of Organic and Paid Search With the help of Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console, we identified high-volume and high-intent keywords like "Harga Converse Sepatu", "Converse 70s", and more. These set of keywords helped us win on both paid and organic listings with little to no competition. Such keywords were then removed from our SEM campaigns, resulting in reduced spends while also maintaining traffic. This efficient budget utilisation led to improved search performance, achieving a higher RoAS on SEM and increased organic traffic for the paused paid keywords. In a similar way, with the OneSearch framework, each keyword opportunity was first tested for incremental impact and then implemented. Phase 2: Improving User Journey from SERP to Conversion Based on cross-learnings between SEO and SEM, we saw scope for improved user journey from landing pages for paid ads. The performance of existing pages was analysed to check the organic conversion rate, and new website pages were created as per our recommendations. These pages were designed to provide details about the brand and collection to maintain transparency. For instance, a new collection page was created for "Converse Run Star", which had high organic traffic and share-of-voice. This new page replaced existing landing pages on paid campaigns, leading to an improved quality score and user journey.
Data
Thanks to the festive season, H2 saw us grappling with cut-throat competition. Yet, at Performics, we successfully reduced Converse.ID's Cost-Per-Clicks by a whopping 32%. That's not it. With the jaw-dropping outcome of our customised framework, OneSearch became the Business as Usual (BAU)/Always-On strategy for our client.
Solution
Results
We tested OneSearch for a period of 6 months to understand its impact across all metrics and on the overall business. Date Range: January '22 to June '22 versus August '22 to January '23 Impact on Search Metrics: Here's the incredible impact of the OneSearch strategy, - We achieved 71% higher revenue driven by 14% higher overall search traffic, at 28% lower cost by saving and reinvesting media spends strategically - Cost-Per-Clicks reduced by 32% despite the effects of higher competition observed during Q4 of 2022 - Keywords for which paid SEM bidding was paused, improved organically with Click-Through-Rates jumping from 2.5% to 9.5% - Keywords on which saved budgets were reinvested, garnered incremental revenue with improved impression share from 72% to 92% - Paid search campaign's RoAS increased from 3.46 to 9.76 Impact on Overall Business: - Converse D2C revenue contribution to the overall Converse business in Indonesia increased from 31% to 43%.
