Impressive growth for Kiddies Kingdom

After trying a couple of campaigns with an internal PPC specialist, Kiddies Kingdom had struggled to achieve a strong cost of sale to ensure the account was profitable, so in 2012, Circus took over the account. At that point there were a small handful of campaigns live at a very low aggression, mainly leading to brand only sales. In a market dominated by a few retailers, Circus needed to compete with these retailers and ensure Kiddies Kingdom took full advantage of Google shopping to achieve a strong ROI and improve poor mobile performance.

Circus grew the monthly sales by a huge 1,522% whilst the revenue was increased by 1,411%. Revenue increased from £7.7k to £116.7K a month, and sales increased from 41 to 665 a month.

In the first month, sales increased by 227% whilst revenue increased by 101%. The cost of sale did slightly increase however. We then increased sales again in the following month by 31%, the revenue by 10% and brought the cost of sale down by 24%, making the account very profitable.

We’ve taken an agile approach for our work with Kiddies Kingdom, and strategy has changed many times over the years through regular discussion. The most recent strategy focusses on the different brands sold on Kiddies Kingdom, accompanied by a very strong shopping presence. Because of their competitive pricing, ad copy is crucial to help them stand out from the crowd.

Ongoing keyword optimisation, negative keyword reviews and understanding the trends throughout the year, month and week are crucial for Kiddies Kingdom to remain profitable in this industry and take advantage of the best performing times. Geo analysis allowed us to increase the bid for the better performing locations and lower the bid for the poorer ones, all within one campaign.

Mobile was mainly being used for research and didn’t drive many direct sales, so making a bid adjustment here helped improve performance. More recently Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) has been implemented which is performing extremely well. With the latest strategy we are seeing strong results and within the next year, expect to double the sales and revenue again whilst holding a strong cost of sale.

An increase in online buying meant an increase in the potential for Kiddies Kingdom hence the targets for March and April were increased however doing more than double the revenue wasn’t something we had imagined at a stronger cost of sale as well.

The strong performance allowed to go live on new platforms including Facebook, Criteo and Pinterest with strong results coming from all of these during this period.

Circus PPC studied market trends closely to ensure that they were 1 step ahead of competitors and ensured they were and are pushing the categories that are seeing the biggest increase in seasonality due to COVID-19, ensuring that Kiddies Kingdom held a high impression share in order to capture market share from the competitors, even outranking giants such as John Lewis in certain cases. The Circus PPC team and the Kiddies Kingdom team worked very closely to ensure we achieve this.

Utilising Smart Shopping and automation to our advantage enabled us to push the right products at the right time to the right people and meant that our strategy was able to adapt quickly to the influx of retail queries which happened over this period.

Making key strategic decisions was and is key through this period to ensure growth where some products which are more profitable meant the cost of sale target here could be increased whist maintaining the overall strong cost of sale target across the account.

Overall, the account had the strongest period since launch not just for PPC but also overall with PPC feeding into other channels as well which we can see through the attribution data.