Cooking up a X7.8 aMER with cost caps for E-Catering

The Brief

When commercial catering equipment brand, E-Catering, approached Target the brand was in need of a complex overhaul of its paid search and paid social accounts. The brief contained several objectives:

• To build structures and systems that could be shared internally to help stakeholders to reconcile paid media performance with top and bottom line business results.
• To identify, test and implement opportunities to improve paid media efficiency
• To increase paid media revenue by 10% YoY, using the same budget (in a world of rising CPCs & CPMs)

Our Response

To solve E-Catering's first challenge, we built a bespoke real-time performance dashboard and created a trading report that is delivered to stakeholders ahead of the brand's weekly trading meeting. The report contains up to 5 key eCommerce trends that our consultants have seen that week. Anything from buying behaviours and discount code utilisation, through to significant shifts in pLTV and AOV. More importantly, the report contains an aMER (acquisition marketing efficiency ratio) metric, which combines all paid media channel revenue divided by ad spend and Target's agency fees to help stakeholders understand E-Catering's revenue performance as a multiplier of marketing costs - ultimately, holding every invested pound accountable. Next up, our team ran days of extensive desk research, analysis of historical data and audits of E-Catering's paid media accounts. This unlocked 3 key insights that shaped our strategy and results:

• Customers who's first purchase is low value (<£120) go on to have a lower LTV and also repeat less frequently
• Product searches where there is mixed B2B/B2C intent (e.g. commercial/home "microwaves") were creating inefficiency in Google & Microsoft Ads
• There is a direct correlation between the weather and performance in certain categories

The Next Steps

Up next on E-Catering's 30/60/90 day roadmap is the creation of a scoring metric to be used as a proxy for measuring the quality of pMax traffic - the metric will be an index score based on bounce rate, session duration and views per session. Our paid media consultants will also be working with E-Catering's Shopify dev agency on a series of product landing page CRO advisories, as well as a series of creative tests across Meta Ads led by our Creative Strategist, Ellie.