The Ask
The Aaron's e-commerce website had experienced explosive sales growth from paid media in 2018, and the company wanted to invest more in 2019 without experiencing diminishing returns. Swarm worked with the client's business analytics team to focus on the company's the highest margin product categories to retain a high return on ad spend (ROAS).
The Challenge
Aaron's was the first rent-to-own company to embrace e-commerce but now faced competition online.
Aaron's was the first rent-to-own retailer to take their business model online, and they had seen early success in paid search without a lot of competition. Paid search quickly became one of the company's best performing marketing channels and the company was eager to invest more. At the same time, more competitors were taking their rent-to-own businesses online and driving up the cost of ads.
Spend more and target upper-funnel audiences without sacrificing cost per acquisition or channel ROAS (return on ad spend)
Fighting the headwind of more online retailers paying to show up for Aaron's branded searches and driving up advertising costs
Differentiate from competitors
The SolutionAaron's asked Swarm to help grow their most successful marketing channel by spending more and finding new audiences. At the same time, they were wary about seeing losses in efficiency even with a larger media spend.
To tackle this challenge, Swarm approached the Aaron's business analytics team to identify the margin on each product category. The media team immediately began to reallocate dollars to categories that had higher margins even if they sometimes had a higher cost-per-click (CPC) or a lower conversion rate (CVR).
Swarm then went after low-hanging fruit by expanding paid search efforts to include direct searches for new product categories with higher conversion rates (CVRs).
Finally, Swarm utilized many of Google's audience tools like Similar Audiences and In-Market Audiences to find new groups of online audiences to nurture. The team also continued to grow remarketing campaigns with different messaging. This upper-funnel to lower-funnel approach paid dividends in results.
