2022 Bronze Marketing Automation

Agency: Assembly

Client: Ralph Lauren

Campaign Name: Flexible Budgeting to Maximise Growth

Campaign Overview

Assembly wanted to leave no stone unturned in PPC campaigns for the fashion giant.

Strategy

With historic and continued growth achieved through PPC, the team challenged itself to utilise proprietary reporting tech Stage and build an advanced forecasting model to deliver maximum revenue for Ralph Lauren.

Assembly wanted to enable robust scenario planning and display relevant monthly budgets to achieve maximum performance. The incremental spend was only allocated at a 'Golden incremental ROAS’.

Additional budget was utilised through innovation and testing across search and shopping, maximising performance.

Predictive forecasts were achieved by considering the following factors: historical account performance; recent performance; campaign type performance and efficiency; product discounting changes and category performance; average revenue achieved per order; additional outside factors such as upper funnel media activity; and upscaling shopping for new customer acquisition.

With the baseline forecast established annually then monthly, the revenue-led forecast was used to harvest brand heat at the right moments where brand demand was high and PPC performance strong.

Assembly worked in collaboration with the brand’s finance team enabling a scalable and flexible budgeting model to maximise revenue to a pre-agreed profitable ROAS.

Creativity

Using bespoke tech platform Stage, Assembly set up automated reporting dashboards to present performance for its own and Ralph Lauren’s team. It was consulted daily to monitor, and respond to revenue achieved in each market and campaign. This involved adjusting automated bid strategies to ensure performance remained above a minimum efficiency threshold.

The flexibility of budgets enabled substantial growth within shopping, and market expansion, account-wide automation progression to smart shopping, PMAX and custom creatives via HTML5 have continued to scale activity.

Flexible budgets allowed PPC to drive a record-breaking peak period and the first always-on expansion into generic search has expanded Ralph Lauren’s presence on Google. In turn, this funnelled further activity towards high-achieving, more profitable brand search.

Results

The campaign achieved consistently strong results, driving significant incremental revenue above plan for the year, with additional spend invested above the minimum efficiency threshold. The forecasting processes are now incorporated into always-on activity.

Automation and reporting allowed the team to make adjustments in real-time, making bid and tactical adjustments. This drove an additional 19% revenue, along with efficient incremental ROAS achieved at 162% above target.

Meanwhile, there were 34% new customers through expansion of generics and shopping; and three times the click share compare to peer set during the same period.

The Team

Assembly - Colm Goode, Senior Paid Search Manager - Daniel Hopkin, Paid Search Manager