The perfect pair: UK Tights and Conversion Optimiser reduce cost-per-conversion by 50% Based in Cheshire, England, UK Tights is one of the leading retailers of hosiery products in the UK. From selling out of a living room when UK Tights was founded in 2005, the company is now doubling the size of its warehouse in 2008 to accommodate its phenomenal year-on-year growth. Summer 2008 also saw the launch of a second online retail store, offering additional product lines through UKBikinis.co.uk.
“We are seeing a lot more conversions compared to when I was trying to manage it all myself.” Jonathan Barber Founder and Technical Director
Jonathan and Dawn Barber, the founders of UK Tights, had been looking for a way to build their own business and become self employed. After Dawn proposed selling tights online, Jonathan, a successful web development consultant, created the site and UKTights.com was launched. Three years on, and the company now has a worldwide, loyal customer base. “When we first started, we were wondering who we’d sell to outside of our hometown and now it’s very much a global, international business. Google is like our shop window as it were”, recalls Jonathan. UK Tights made its first sale as a result of their AdWords campaign and Jonathan and Dawn have continued to use Google AdWords to drive their business. “From day one we have used Google AdWords. I don’t think we would have gotten anywhere without it!” Jonathan uses a wide range of AdWords tools to ensure the performance of their campaigns. “At one time, I had to say, ‘I want [my ad] to be in such a position’, so I had to monitor what my competitors where doing and adjust accordingly”, notes Jonathan. In March 2008, Jonathan discovered the Conversion Optimiser, a new bid management feature within AdWords that adjusts CPC bids based on conversion goals, and now he spends less time monitoring his campaigns. After seeing the results, Jonathan is now a complete convert to Conversion Optimiser. For the initial weeks after enabling the bid management feature, there was a little fine tuning to be done to ensure everything worked well. “After the first month, we got things running well and saw an increase in sales and it more than halved our cost-per-conversion. Twice as many sales for the same cash has got to be good.” UK Tights saw more conversions in June than they had in February 2008, even though the expectation would be that the sale of tights would slow down in the run up to Summer. According to Jonathan, this is 70-80% down to Conversion Optimiser driving conversions and spending wisely. “Normally in May and June things are very quiet, that’s why we decided to do UK Bikinis, but we are selling as much stock as we did at Christmas”.
CONVERSION OPTIMISER Conversion Optimiser is a free AdWords feature that manages your advertising costs around specific conversion goals. You specify a maximum cost-peracquisition (CPA) bid and the Conversion Optimiser automatically manages your CPC bids for you. For more information about Conversion Optimiser, please visit http://adwords.google.co.uk/support/bin/a nswer.py?answer=60150. For more information visit www.google.co.uk/ads
Since using the Conversion Optimiser, UK Tights has seen a massive 52% decrease in its average cost-per-conversion and Jonathan hopes to use Conversion Optimiser for their new UK Bikinis campaign as soon as possible. ““The idea is, as soon as we get up to 100 conversions, we will look to turn it on. I am loathe to move away from using Conversion Optimiser ... bidding is hard work without it.” To take advantage of Conversion Optimiser, you need to have 100+ conversions in one campaign in 30 days. Simply enable Conversion Optimiser by selecting ‘View and Edit Bidding Options’ within your campaign settings.
©2008 Google Inc. All rights reserved. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc.
1308968-IRL
