Luminate data informed a fresh media approach for this consumer goods brand

The challenge: Increase online discoverability and boost sales of high-performing in-store items

A new Flywheel client challenged us to overhaul its media strategy across a few key categories. Diving into the company’s performance, a key issue that stood out to us was multiple instances of ‘mirroring’. Mirroring is when a brand is spending budget on Sponsored Product placements for items that are already ranking well organically. This is a waste of ad spend and limits incremental growth. It’s important to catch instances of mirroring in order to divert these funds towards products that are not reaching customers organically.  

The solution: Luminate data helps identify opportunities for online discoverability

Using the client's Luminate data, we were able to identify items that were performing well in store, but were lacking in discoverability online.. We identified 4 items that ranked high in in-store sales that were prime for online discoverability improvements. This meant that these items were organically ranking in slots 20-60 and could be elevated to the top of search results without a significant investment in paid support. Items ranking farther down than slot 60 would require significant paid support while items ranking in slots 0-20 are already on page 1 and are highly discoverable.

After using the in-store sales data to identify items with the most opportunity for online improvement, we identified strategic non-branded keywords by category where each product’s organic position was limiting discoverability, and targeted these specifically through manual, exact match campaigns. This opened the door to looking at how trade-up items could additionally replace the items that were mirroring, and this tactic overlapped with items performing well in-store.

By using Luminate's in-store sales rank data, combined with organic rank and media support data, we were able to uncover missed opportunities for performance improvement for this client. We then shifted funds to items that consumers were clearly interested in but just weren’t discovering online based on being too far down the search results page.  

The results: Overall increase in sales, digital penetration, and product rank

The results of this case study are broken down by product below:

Product 1

This product originally had an in-store sales rank of 10 and organic rank of 52, showing the potential to use its in-store success as an opportunity to improve online performance. By introducing paid support we were able to:

• Increase sales by 116% YoY with category sales only up 21%.

• Almost double digital penetration , up 207+bps

Products 2-3

Products 2 and 3 had organic ranks of 40 and 55 respectively, and were high performers in store (similar to the product above). We identified a product within this category of the portfolio that was a high performer online but was experiencing instances of mirroring, so funds were shifted from the mirroring product to Products 2 and 3. This shift also helped to drive discoverability of trade-up items as Products 2 and 3 were chosen not only for their ability to move up the search results but also drive more profitable sales as two-packs. In eliminating the instances of mirroring and shifting the funds to products 2 and 3, the brand saw:

• (Formerly) mirroring product sales up 30% YoY  

• Product 2 sales up 490% YoY, with category only up 33%

• Product 3 sales up 56% YoY

Overall, this strategy has helped increase category share exponentially.

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Product 4

This item had an in-store sales rank of 7 with an organic rank of 36 and digital penetration was at 5%. Funds were shifted from a smaller bottle to this product, a larger bottle. Here are the results of this shift:  

• Digital penetration increasing to 10%

• Sales up 151% YoY, with category only up 4% YoY in this period

• Improvement in online sales rank from 37 to 14 across the brand’s portfolio

And we haven’t stopped there. We continue to test this strategy everywhere we find the opportunity to utilize Luminate’s in-store sales data to inform our media strategies.

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