Boots: Omnichannel Bid Optimisation

With Boots having a large UK store footprint, we recognised significant impact on store footfall from paid search campaign activity through Google Ads Store Visits measurement. But we were keen to incorporate Store Sales and Revenue data to optimise our Google and Bing activity towards business outcomes.

The weakest link in our pursuit of omnichannel bidding towards a ROAS target was the lack of accurate in-store revenue data. We knew a one-size-fits-all average of visits to store sales ratio and average order value for in-store sales revenue was not the most accurate way to build an online-to-offline picture for paid search. So, we worked with our client and tech partners, LiveRamp and Search Ads 360 to utilise actual store sales and revenue data. This was then integrated with Search Ads 360, and we built out bid strategy portfolios incorporating online and offline ROAS. Our test set-up focused on the Health product category where we saw the highest levels of ‘research online/purchase offline’ behaviour. By making minimal campaign changes during SA360’s learning period to aid the machine learning process, we saw strong results from the inclusion of in-store sales data. We achieved a 300% uplift in combined online and offline sales when compared to the year before. This set us up perfectly for the Black Friday and Christmas peak period. “Our in-store and online footprint in the UK requires us to think smarter about how we bid holistically, approaching our Performance Media buying in an omnichannel manner. PPC is the perfect candidate to prove our online-to-offline hypothesis. In partnership with EssenceMediacom, we devised a robust O2O strategy which delivered brilliant incremental results for the bottom line – a massive collaborative win between Boots and EssenceMediacom which pushed our boundaries in Performance Media capability even further.” Neil Jones, Head of Performance Media, Boots