Google AdWords case study: Lets-Have-A-Party.co.uk
Lets-Have-A-Party.co.uk was set up in December 2003 as a small family business. From their Chepstow base however, Lets-Have-A-Party.co.uk has expanded rapidly and now counts itself as one of the top ten fancy dress retailers in the UK. Annual growth has been in the order of 200%-300%. Their combination of a massive product range and reasonable prices has insured that Lets-Have-A-Party.co.uk has proved a hit with online customers. After just three years in business, annual turnover now stands at well over £1 million. Fancy dress is an established industry online and according to Chris Vaines, Managing Director, “the only way to really ramp up your sales is to get AdWords going and get it going right.”
The nature of fancy dress is quite seasonal. And in the lulls after Halloween and Christmas, time is taken to re-evaluate the business and how things are going. Although his account was performing very well, he felt there was room for improvement. Vaines looked to conversion tracking and Google Analytics as the final pieces of the puzzle. Since implementing these free Google tools, Vaines claims that the benefits have absolutely snowballed. Using conversion tracking Vaines was very easily able to find out which keywords were making him money and which keywords were not. He describes his introduction to the tool as ‘an absolute light-bulb moment, I started adding the code and it was all set up that night. It was so important to us. Since then we have been driving a lot more value.”
Analytics has proved similarly effective for Lets-Have-A-Party.co.uk. Using the reports it gives on user behaviour, the tool opened up a whole new world of potential keywords. One of the insights that it gave was the effectiveness of ‘obvious’ keywords. Vaines explains, “You would think our main word would be ‘fancy dress’, so just throw as much money at it as you can. But actually it’s not always that effective.” So with this information gained from Google Analytics and indeed with what Vaines calls their “new understanding of the AdWords model”, Lets-Have-A-Party.co.uk were able to find a host of complementary keywords that boasted better clickthrough rates (in the region of 20%), better positions and, most importantly, better ROI. With a background in banking, Vaines realises the worth of Analytical data: “Google Analytics is such an enormous resource. For something you get for free, it is absolutely awesome… some of the commercial software out there isn’t as good as this.”
The sales boasted by Lets-Have-A-Party.co.uk seem to defy the reality of a family business that only recently moved the storage of their costumes from their home into a warehouse. Going forward, Lets-Have-A-Party.co.uk intend to continue with their AdWords approach which has driven so much success. The changes that they have made to their business using conversion traffic and Analytics seem to be “driving considerably better profit.” Conversion rates have increased by half a percent. Though that metric may not seem overwhelming, Vaines points out that “this works out at a lot of money.” © Copyright 2007
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