To take their results to the Premier League, we tackled this digital strategy with a two staged approach. Our first focus was to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their search campaigns and gain some solid wins for Football Central. Then we applied an engaging and high performing social media strategy to take their results to the next level. 

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1. Search Strategy

We identified that their past search campaigns had been primarily brand related searches. While there is nothing inherently wrong with brand campaigns, Football Central were already showing top of page for their brand related searches. By pivoting away from this campaign type, we were able to save them from unnecessary spending on users who already had extremely high intent to purchase. Instead we focused the budget on acquiring new customers and were able to increase the volume of traffic to the site through new search terms and long tailed, product-based searches. 

As part of the onboarding setup process we completed a deep clean of their merchant centre, which allowed us to optimise their presence on Google shopping. We worked with FC to better configure the metadata of their products and dramatically increase the number of products successfully synced with merchant centre and therefore eligible for display through Google shopping campaigns. We oversaw an increase of 200 active products to 2,000 active products (900% increase in active products) for Google Shopping. 

The impact of this was an increased visibility of shopping campaign products. This resulted in a 196% increase in transactions and a 171% growth in revenue for the shopping campaign, when compared with the previous year of performance. 

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2. Social Strategy:

Once search was scoring goals, we introduced the social strategy into the game. Similar to search, we had an objective to increase the traffic to the website and increase sales. We focused on ad creatives that enticed our audience to click through to view the products. Then we retargeted the visitors using catalogue based ads, serving the right message at the right time to the customer significantly increased our return on investment (ROI). 

With plenty of balls in play (like team kit releases, tournaments, and different seasons), we needed a campaign calendar to clearly define which campaigns and strategies were launching throughout the year. 

We recognised early on that our impact would be most prominent during their quiet seasons. Here we experimented with interactive ads and still stimulated steady sales. 

We used a number of different ad types to focus on different aspects of reaching and engaging the audience. We used poll ads to engage with passionate fans, for example “which team are you repping?”. The team they chose, directed them to the chosen teams merchandise page on the Football Central site, this meant we were seeing really good engagement and intent through the website. These aligned with team merch releases throughout the year, like Man United and Man City uniform releases.

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The Result:

Together with Football Central, we used effective search and social campaigns to increase growth, revenue and trust.

By moving the ad spend away from branded keyword searches, to long-tail keywords, we generated great click-through rates for keywords that hadn't been utilised before. This created a more diverse and potentially more qualified visitor which contributed to an increase in time on site, and purchases.

By utilising a campaign calendar and using the slow season for experiments, we were able to consistently generate results for Football Central. This outcome was helped massively by the synergy created between our team and the client, enabling us to be constantly on the ball with our strategy.