Improving the strategy and automation behind paid ads for Joe Browns

Established in 1988, Joe Browns is a British lifestyle brand known for its eclectic and vibrant clothing styles, inspired by vintage and bohemian influences. 

Joe Browns sought to improve it’s paid media performance, which included measuring audience data, improved automation, experimentation, and a strategic approach to campaigns. As our working relationship developed, we had new targets such as business growth, enhanced performance, and reduced Google Ad CPCs.

Paid Search

The year-on-year CPC increase prompted an investigation into key factors like platform competition, audience size, ad quality, relevance, and campaign optimisation. The main driver was the “Joe Brown” keywords, likely due to, “brown,” being a common clothing-related term, inflating costs across campaigns. 

Because of these challenges, we went with a tailored approach and restructured the campaigns to help align with the different products available on their website – splitting out core keywords such as, “Joe Browns” into its own campaign. 

Google heavily promoted Performance Max and Broad Match keywords, and we saw initial benefits. However, our figures were not as strong the following year as more people implemented this strategy, so we started to switch to an exact-only approach, resulting in slightly lower volume but better efficiency, which the client wanted to prioritise. 

We provided some recommendations to help optimise conversion rates across the Joe Browns website with the help of our SEO team, where we started to see a steady improvement in conversion rate. 

Paid Social

We utilised paid social as a channel for Joe Browns, keeping in mind the focus of their business strategy: to target new customers, whilst driving an efficient return on investment. We capitalised on Meta’s machine-learning capabilities, by consolidating campaigns and ad sets to help feed more data into individual campaigns. Shifting from granular targeting and creative strategy to this approach resulted in significant growth in traffic and sales.

As the costs of CPCs were rising, we tested a Landing Page Views (LPV) bid strategy, resulting in more affordable CPCs (£0.04 compared to £0.23) when using a sales objective. This also achieved a higher CTR (6.2%) compared to the sales objective (3.7%), proving more effective at driving engaged users to the site at a lower cost.

This approach meant we could adopt a holistic strategy, using LPV to bring users into the funnel while retargeting campaigns and other channels to encourage conversions. During the cost-effective LPV approach, we continued to run sales campaigns, as they had a stronger ROI and higher incremental returns long-term, and this combination reinforced our messaging to potential customers and ultimately drove sales growth. 

Leveraging first-party audiences through the Bloomreach platform played a pivotal role in scaling our Paid Social efforts for prospecting and retargeting. By using existing customer data, we segmented audiences into key clusters such as high-value customers, frequent low-value customers, loyal customers, and new customers.

Once we had the segmented audience data, we delivered tailored messages to each group for more effective remarketing. Moreover, the first-party customer data empowered us to create high-quality lookalike audiences, enabling us to identify and engage with new potential customers efficiently.

Integrating Advantage+ Shopping into our strategy helped us to achieve enhanced results through advanced automation, dynamic testing, optimised budget allocation, and greater operational efficiency. This approach delivered lower costs, improved performance metrics, and a streamlined campaign structure, enabling more effective and scalable outcomes. Notably, Advantage+ Shopping campaigns achieved a 39.7% lower cost per purchase compared to standard campaigns, highlighting their effectiveness in driving results.

Paid Search Results

During the period of July 2024 and November 2024, in comparison to the previous year, we achieved some great results for Joe Browns.

From a paid search & shopping perspective, we managed to see a really positive improvement across the board through all of the key Joe Browns metrics. The difficulty here was ensuring we didn’t see a reduction or loss in revenue and traffic to their site, whilst still ensuring we were optimising towards a lower average CPC, which we managed to achieve. Whilst this achievement is important, it can’t be forgotten that the main aim of activity like this is to drive sales and revenue performance for the client. Throughout that same time period, not only did we see a huge improvement to traffic and efficiency, but our overall sales data was far improved too.

We spent a lot of time refining Joe Browns’ generic campaign offering and structure, which led to not only overall improvements but also a strong YoY increase in generics. However, some of these figures may be somewhat inflated beyond what you’d typically expect from an improved strategy alone, as generics were more heavily introduced in 2024 and weren’t used as frequently in 2023. Alongside our 372% uplift in impressions, we managed to reduce CPCs and increase our total conversion revenue.

Paid Social Results

From a Meta Ads perspective, we successfully increased awareness among new customers through prospecting campaigns, leveraging increased investment and strategic optimisations. We focused on testing new creatives, including additional video assets, to enhance brand visibility and drive traffic to the site. Additionally, we took a holistic approach to evaluate whether this uplift extended to other channels.

By testing consolidated approaches, such as Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping campaigns and Advantage+ audiences, we successfully identified new, relevant, and highly engaged audiences. This led to improved conversion rates among both new and existing customers. Through our tailored messaging and holistic approach to Joe Brown’s paid social strategy, we saw ROAS increase by 37 % YoY, with an increase in sales and revenue, both across our prospecting and retargeting campaigns.