Project Background

As a rapidly expanding eCommerce business, iPantry has relied heavily on Google Search & Shopping to drive new customer acquisition. iPantry's next-day delivery & competitive pricing has been a huge driver behind their success.

Key Challenges:

• Understanding the true value of new customer acquisition, well beyond their initial purchase. Much analysis was conducted into the lifetime value of customers, versus the overall cost of acquiring new customers from various digital advertising channels.
• Balancing bidding strategies between 'aggressive' and 'conservative'. We needed to ensure that we captured enough volume so the business could grow, without jeopardising the level of return our client was getting.
• Understanding each customer's journey throughout the iPantry site, and their repeat purchase behaviour. We had to understand the traditional limitations behind analytics and tracking, to advise our client on bidding strategies and costings.

Our Strategy

The primary goal with iPantry was to target regular consumers in Melbourne looking to purchase their weekly groceries online. Due to heavy lockdowns that occurred in Melbourne (and accross the country) during the early days of the business, there has been a huge growth in the eCommerce segment within the online grocery shopping space.

We pivoted from the initial plan

Initially, the plan was fairly simple; target users who were looking to make their weekly grocery shop online. This was primarily a Google Search PPC play. Users within Melbourne who were looking for things such as ‘buy groceries online’, ‘online supermarket’ etc., would be served our search adverts, then sent to a relevant landing page that highlighted iPantry as a trustworthy online grocery shopping provider.

Implementing Google Shopping over Google Search Ads

Initially, Google Shopping made up only a small portion of our budget. Our thought process was that users wouldn’t be searching individually on Google for each product they wanted to purchase within their weekly grocery shop. It was hypothesized that users searching to make their full weekly shop online would spend more than users who were simply looking for 1 or 2 specific items.

Focusing on our client's strengths

As an example, we took notice of the fact that our client had great prices on several specialty milk products. We decided to give ‘SMART’ shopping a go. Setting our target return on ad spend at 300%, we would gradually increase the daily budget. The initial results were surprising. Not only was the return on ad spend substantially better than our initial search adverts strategy, but the cart values were larger and these customers would often come back to buy multiple times from iPantry.

Scaling up proven strategies

Once we saw the success of SMART shopping, we added more budget and adjusted the target ROAS to be more in line with our initial goals. The combination of re-marketing and standard shopping adverts proved to be a real success.

iPantry’s specialist milk products such as ‘Milk Lab’ and ‘Bonsoy’ had an incredible response through Google Shopping. Whilst people who are searching for one specific product often buy that product, they also end up buying other products they find on the marketplace, rather than just the initial product they were looking for. SMART shopping became an incredible form of new customer acquisition, users ended up buying many products that they weren’t even initially searching for.