The brief

The Tattoo Shop supply tattoo professionals and studios around the UK and Europe with a complete range of tattoo equipment and have over 20 years experience in the tattooing trade.

Initially, we were tasked by the Tattoo Shop to improve their sales for the UK market and deliver an ROAS of £5:1. They had had limited success with AdWords in the past and had been relying on Goals in AdWords to try and measure sales, but had no insight into revenue achieved.

The promotion of the UK website by Space & Time’s  PPC team was a great success so we were then briefed to start PPC activity for France. We weren’t given specific targets so mainly focussed on increasing sales and maximising the Return on Ad Spend by tracking the success of our campaigns through Google Analytics. After achieving great results with France we were then asked to look after the AdWords accounts for the German, Spanish and Italian Tattoo Shop websites.  The PPC for these countries had previously been looked after by another agency who had not been able to deliver the results the client wanted.

Our solution

When we first started advertising the UK website through AdWords, we worked closely with the client and their web developer to fix issues within  their Analytics tagging and to properly implement eCommerce tracking to be able to see how their AdWords investment translated into sales. We identified key product groups on the site, and began by promoting them. When this delivered a return, we were able to expand and start advertising more products. We created some ad variations and split test them to optimise them and also implemented all of the relevant ad extensions. We worked with the client’s web developer to create a custom spreadsheet in order to run a Google Shopping campaign.  We also set up Remarketing for Display and Search in order to recapture non converting traffic. A more recent development is that we have implemented RLSA for Shopping.

As the Tattoo Shop is a UK based company with their headquarters and distribution centre in the UK, we expected a lower conversion rate for the European target markets. So when we started the French, German, Spanish and Italian AdWords accounts, we initially put the focus on the promotion of the high-margin products . As with the UK all accounts and campaigns are broken down very granularly to enable us to serve the most specific ad copy and have total transparency and control over keywords. The insights we had already gained from the UK AdWords activity proved to be very valuable when setting up the new European accounts: We mirrored the account and campaign structure, translated the keywords and ad copy messages that worked best for the UK and enhanced the campaigns with sitelink and callout extensions in order to refine activity towards the individual needs of each market. After setting up Remarketing for Display and Search in the French PPC account, we worked on a move on to Google Shopping to further increase the ROAS. Once this proves a worthwhile route it will be rolled out across all European accounts.

The results

The way the accounts and campaigns are structured, together with the Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking to record the number of transactions and revenue each campaign generates, enables us to accurately report on ROAS. Due to this the client is able to see exactly which product groups perform well and how effective the campaigns are. Over the year and a half we have had the UK AdWords account, the client has increased their monthly spend by 120%; we have always achieved their £5:1 ROAS,sometimes bettering it, every single month. In our best month we achieved a £10.37:1 ROAS, doubling the target we were set.

The AdWords activity to promote the France targeted website also exceeded the client’s expectations right from the start with a strong ROAS that has remained stable as we gradually grew the account and increased the spend over the months, building in new product groups and Remarketing Display activity. In Germany the situation was very similar; right from the beginning we were able to achieve a good ROAS , albeit not as high as in France (probably because the Tattoo Shop brand seems to be best  known in France compared to the other target European markets).  The PPC accounts targeting the Italian and Spanish markets are still in the early stages, however after optimising the campaigns we’ve already seen huge improvements and generating a positive ROAS on these campaigns too. Managing the Tattoo Shop’s international PPC accounts has given us some very valuable and interesting insights into the diverse requirements of different European markets. For example  in Italy there is a lot of search volume but at the same time the average cost per click is much higher than for the other countries which is why the campaigns require a different, rather specialised keyword set and a completely different bidding strategy. What works for one country doesn’t necessarily work for another so it’s very much  about analysing and understanding the individual market to then refine and find the right balance in order to grow the account.

Across all of their websites, including accounts for two more of the client’s businesses, the Tattoo Shop are investing 790% more per month now than in their first month with us, and they are seeing a massive return from it.