Topps Tiles pride themselves on being the biggest tile retailer in the UK, with over 300 branches across the nation. They sell a huge range of tiles to suit all budgets for every room in the home.

The Challenge

Since 2020, Impression’s SEO and paid media teams have been working with Topps Tiles, and last summer, Topps asked Impression to demonstrate the value of branded paid search versus solely relying on organic search, as well as how both can be integrated to improve overall performance.

Our existing paid search strategy was performing well, however, we saw the opportunity to push the account to the next level and help Topps Tiles dominate the market. Topps Tiles wanted us to investigate if paid search activity was cannibalising organic efforts. If it was, then this would provide the opportunity to invest time and budget elsewhere.

Whilst investigating, we also had to ensure:

• That our efforts did not jeopardise overall revenue and ROAS for the business.
• That Topps’ wider business goal, to secure one-third of all unique visitors in the market, was still a top priority
•  

The Strategy

We set out to produce a robust testing methodology with a view to running this for four weeks, or until statistical significance was achieved. Findings would inform future strategy and determine where time and budget would be best spent moving forward.

We monitored activity throughout the testing period, looking at impression volume, branded traffic, CTR and conversions from the brand term in our control and test locations. These metrics allowed us to determine whether switching off Brand impacted visibility, traffic and on-site revenue.

How could we future proof our insights?

Too often when testing brand incrementality, businesses are sometimes inclined to switch off completely, and compare results either vs. previous period of previous year. This wouldn’t allow for context to be taken into account.

We chose a period where minimal external factors would come into play - stores were back open, lockdown had eased and no sales were running. Therefore, we could compare two test groups within a controlled period, and be confident that the results would sustain relevance.

The Results

We successfully achieved significant, actionable results through an innovative and collaborative approach. A test of this nature was entirely new but our client trusted our judgement.

We achieved 33.3% of unique visitor share, securing ? of all unique visitors in the market by September 2021 (ahead of December’s target!)