Direct Repair case: Growth while maintaining your ROI

18 min read

Google, Google ads, Google shopping, SEA

About Direct Repair

Direct Repair is an online-only business selling parts for domestic appliances used in home and garden. They operate in France and in Belgium, where they’re the leading player in this market. Direct Repair has some 14,000 items in stock, ranging from parts for washing machines to new combs for beard trimmers, featuring leading brands such as AEG, Samsung, Philips, Bosch, Siemens, Whirlpool, Bauknecht, Braun and Miele. Another three million parts can be easily accessed.

The Goal

Direct Repair came to us with an ambitious goal: to become the sector’s world leader. Margins are tight in this market. Direct Repair wanted to maintain a fixed ROI (return on investment) alongside exponential growth. Our initial focus was on SEO (search engine optimisation) for their current website. Beyond that a responsive, mobile friendly site was needed, to counter existing limitations, in SEO and SEA (search engine advertising) for instance.

 

Our Translation of the Goal

Direct Repair trusted us. They knew we’d put our biggest effort into changes that would have the greatest impact on the bottom line. With every client there are many ways to achieve goals – from SEA to social media – and our approach is always first to choose those with the biggest effect on revenue and profits.

The assignment from Direct Repair was simple: do whatever you can to help us grow. At BossData, this is our favourite type of customer. Direct Repair’s two owners are open to new approaches. They were keen to test every method – and to put time, resources and money into the task. They were willing to learn. That made our partnership powerful.

Every two weeks, we spent time at their office to keep in close contact. We maintained an open mind: at BossData we never fixate on one approach. While we started with SEO, we moved on to SEA and analytics, which had a major impact when looking at they way they grew. A combined approach is the only way to have a successful digital strategy. You can have great SEA, but if the website isn’t optimised, the impact will be minimal.

Metrics we measured

  • Sales: we measured the amount of e-commerce sales.
  • Order value: With small margins we keep a close eye on order value and act on margin not revenue.
  • ROI: Constant monitoring of the Return-On-Investment for Direct Repair.

 

Leverage effective management of online campaigns by measuring offline results

From Goal to Action

First up was SEO for the current website. In switching agencies to us, traffic was lost. We needed to make up ground. In came a new copy-writing strategy, title tags and meta tags, while we optimised existing content. The result: 135% increase in traffic and 124% increase in transactions. Next came SEO for the new website, first focusing on URL structure. We believe we can increase traffic up to tenfold just by implementing the correct URL structure. On conversion, we looked at existing bottlenecks to optimise future conversion rates.

The client was wary of SEA because of past experience, spending a lot for little return. For us, SEA is a key weapon to grow rapidly. Previously a top-to-bottom strategy – was used using generic keywords such as “Philips Parts”.

Our focus was super-segmented, advertising only when the exact code of a product was searched for. We did this at a very big scale. Later we moved up and started to advertise on more generic terms. Besides regular search we have setup Google Product Listings Ads, remarketing campaign, Google Remarketing for Search, Google Dynamic campaigns and Bing ad campaigns.

We moved very fast and we build campaigns in high speed since we were keen on keeping the campaigns on the ROI target Direct Repair was aiming for. Result: very segmented campaigns at a very big scale.

These approaches were so successful that at a certain point we were in a meeting together and were discussing if Direct Repair was able to handle an even bigger increase in amount of orders. It’s always great to hear that. Our view is: fix it, and let’s move on :).

Results

Direct Repair was sceptical of SEA, so we needed to be right. In a very short timeframe 23% of all transactions came from SEA. SEA traffic saw an 141% increase in transactions while maintaining a lower than expected cost per conversion. For SEO we saw a 135% increase in traffic resulting in a 124% increase in transactions. We not only met their ROI target, but exceeded it.

We always say: if you give us the freedom to test, we’ll fail fast and win big. It’s something of a motto with us. We have to test, we have to fail – we’ll do it very fast and we learn quickly. Therefore we will win BIG. Direct Repair allowed us the freedom and the results speak for themselves. This case is very important for Bossdata to show how we can grow rapidly if you take a leap of faith.

  • +141% SEA transactions
  • +135% Organic traffic
  • +5% Cost per conversion

 

What’s Next?

There are many aspects of digital marketing we can address for Direct Repair. They’re doing very little email marketing, SEO and conversion optimisation can result in further growth.

Internationalisation also has a strong appeal. Most parts are small, and clients are so pleased to find the – often difficult-to-find – part they’re happy to pay a little more in shipping costs. First targets will be other European countries, where we foresee a very bright future for Direct Repair.

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