Executive Summary
A website migration coupled with a Google Ads restructure
Montezuma’s is an artisan chocolate manufacturer originating in Sussex. Montezuma’s makes chocolate treats for any occasion from birthdays to corporate gifts and vegan options.
Montezuma’s goal has always been to be ‘Britain’s greatest little chocolate company’ ensuring chocolate can be enjoyed by anyone and everyone all year round. They needed a strategy to and an agency to help see that come to fruition.
The Problem
Ageing website & reactive search in a competitive market
An ageing website needed to be updated. In a competitive market Montezuma’s wanted something that was going to stand out & represent their quirky brand.
Launching a new site however, is always a hurdle that needs to be negotiated carefully. There are many pitfalls lurking in the dark when migrating to a new site, many of which can have a disastrous consequences on your new site before it’s even launched.
Following the decision to update the website, Montezuma’s also wanted to increase their share in the paid search marketplace, previous PPC activity was somewhat reactive and tried to cover all bases. The approach needed to be refined and structured in a way that could scale with consumer demand.
The Solution
Site migrations and structured search
First and foremost was ensuring a seamless site migration. Before the new site was designed, an SEO migration project needed to be started, as with any SEO migration, it would involve a huge number of components including:
Research of data to ensure the site maintained valuable pages and built a strong sitemap.
Keyword research to help optimise existing pages, or create new pages where there was an opportunity to do so. This would give the site the best possible chance to maintain rankings come migration day.
Evaluation of the site design itself, reviewing wireframes and layout.
A crawl of the existing site, demo site and new live site, to capture any indexing errors, technical problems or potential ranking hurdles.
A complete check of redirects ensuring they are set up correctly and no issues should arrive come the day of launch.
By following the process rigorously, we were confident of a successful site migration, with key objectives being to not only maintain, but improve rankings, traffic & revenue following this process.
With the site successfully migrated, from both a technical and rankings point of view, it was now time to increase visits, conversions and revenue. The Google Ads search account had been restructured into an efficient tiered system. This provided a solid base to enable and refine campaigns and products to fit with user demand.
As March 2020 rolled around and Coronavirus forced shops to close, there was understandably some trepidation about continuing to spend. Shopping activity was paused initially while standard search ads in March started to reap the rewards of being a desirable product within the mini boom of e-commerce purchasing. ROAS saw huge increases, going from 0.78 in February to 11.40 in March. This continued throughout the first UK lockdown with ROAS peaking in April at 28.75.
Due to the work completed prior to the pandemic, we were able to fluidly move budgets into brand campaigns during spring months, then turn the tap on/off for seasonal campaigns. This strategy allowed us to take advantage of Mother’s & Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and the most important, the run up to Christmas.
With the success seen over the summer from search & shopping, we launched display and dynamic remarketing in August, looking to raise brand awareness and keep Montezuma’s in mind as we spent towards the festive season.
The Result
Choc-a-block sales!
Site rankings saw an immediate increase following the migration, going from an overall average position of 52 to 47 for the keywords being tracked. With constant monitoring, rankings did fluctuate over the following months, finally stabilising and seeing consistent growth to an overall position of 42.
We saw increases to priority keywords, such as ‘Absolute Black’ & ‘Chocolate Truffles’ both achieving position 1 rankings throughout 2020.
With the clearer PPC strategy in place for 2020, came huge increases to conversions and revenue, with the latter increasing over 1,000% YoY.
Activity, it must be said, was always on in 2020, whereas 2019 ran in fits and spurts. The always on approach was the strategy we formed knowing we had the ability to increase revenue & secure the target ROAS of 2.52 for the year.
The structured set up allowed campaigns to be managed efficiently and be scaled when needed. This approach, coupled with the increase in ecommerce throughout 2020, saw ROAS finish on 9.32 for the year.
