Meet a Landy Award winner: Wolfgang Digital wins Best SEM Initiative after raising McElhinneys revenue 266%

Ireland’s McElhinneys Department Store wanted to grow its online revenue and expand its international business but had a limited budget to invest in its search marketing efforts.

Knowing the department store’s need, and understanding its budgetary restraints, Wolfgang Digital put a PPC campaign in place that increased ad spend by 23 percent, while driving revenue by 266 percent — earning the agency Search Engine Land’s Landy Award for Best SEM Initiative for Small Business.

“We had been running campaigns for McElhinneys for around 18 months, gathering data and learning what we could about their business and how their customers interacted with their website,” says Robert Beirne, Client Lead for Wolfgang Digital, “We launched a new strategy based on these learnings. This strategy was centered around overcoming the challenges facing us in managing their campaigns and the overall challenges facing McElhinneys’ business.”

Wolfgang knew that McElhinneys repeat online customers spent 80 percent more than first-time visitors and that UK customers responded well to bargains. The agency also knew the store was experiencing negative results from AdWords ads promoting products that were out of stock

Armed with key insights around customer behavior, Wolfgang’s campaign included a number of strategies that resulted in immediate impact.

“We were able to leverage the weak Euro at the time to encourage users in the UK to come and shop with McElhinneys to save money,” says Beirne, “This was something we started promoting as a test, but once we saw how well it was performing, we decided to amplify this using AdWords scripts.”

Beirne says targeting UK customers increased website revenue from the UK by almost 400 percent.

Wolfgang launched a comprehensive RLSA campaign to drive higher conversion rates with repeat customers and also addressed the negative results happening around unavailable products being promoted via AdWords by using an AdWords script that turned off ads for products that were out of stock.

“From my point of view, McElhinneys are a dream client who are ambitious and open to experimentation,” says Beirne, “For a business right up in the corner of Ireland to be competing and succeeding internationally is an amazing achievement.”