eCommerce Advertiser Pet Circle Improves LTV from PPC by Unifying the Right Data

When paid search is the revenue channel that’s the lifeblood of your business, the benefits of granular optimization aren’t simply marginal improvements–they’re paramount in driving growth of your bottom line.

This is certainly true for Australian retailer Pet Circle. Back in mid-2015, their digital marketing organization realized performance was not at the desired levels: they needed a way to scale and automate their PPC program’s optimization.

The team wanted to hit their KPIs and knew they could blend their expertise in paid search and customer acquisition with modern software. Size and complexity had become a significant pain and they simply couldn’t afford to continue running their myriad campaigns manually. They also harbored an underlying dream about focusing more predominantly on Customer Lifetime Value.

Manual Doesn’t Scale

The team at Pet Circle was historically managing their SEM efforts through the Google Marketing Platform, analyzing their account from top to bottom for performance indicators. Their primary metrics of success were Conversions and Cost Per Conversion, yet their volume and the nuance with which they were operating were posing challenges. These required more advanced solutions with more sophisticated functionalities.

Mike Jarocki, the Digital Acquisition Manager at Pet Circle, recalls:

It was time to look for a new solution when our product and category range grew to a level where optimizing bids by hand was no longer scalable and efficient.

Hitting program goals, team goals, and company goals relies on pushing the envelope to improve the acquisition process; the manual tools weren’t empowering them to do the work necessary to achieve the best results.

Addressing the Strategic Data Disconnect

While their overall goal was improving performance and efficiency, Mike and his colleagues also had a particular pain with regards to their marketing data.
As he puts it, the main issue hindering PPC improvement was:

A disconnect between surface-level ad performance (impressions, clicks, transactions, revenue, etc) and customer level performance (LTV).

This provides a moment of true clarity for some digital marketers. Yes, marketers concede that the performance of fundamental “funnel metrics” plays a huge part in their digital acquisition strategy and day-to-day decision making. However, when considering the biggest revenue-driving channel, layering more data together in the right way enables another approach that improves a separate, meaningful metric: the customer’s experience and their lifetime purchases from your brand.

Immediate Wins

Selecting QuanticMind to automate bidding through machine learning was a big win for the team. QuanticMind applied its machine learning and big-data-infrastructure platform, which was able to learn the trends within Pet Circle’s search and shopping campaigns and move the needle intelligently.
The next step was data unification for the more complex LTV goal.

Integrated Data, Better LTV

“QuanticMind has helped us centralize our back-end product and transactional data to overlay profit margin and customer lifetime value with our Google Ads data,” Mike explains. These various data silos are now stitched together and colored with the rich parameters captured by QuanticMind’s pixel: creating full-funnel transparency.

The key, however, was that it could all be put to use.

Pieced together, the data was integrated in a way that made it actionable. Not just actionable to the human eye and manual mouse-click, but to the same AI-powered system that was already calculating optimal bids across their program.

This newly integrated data set was immediately usable in QuanticMind’s advanced algorithms that found trends, forecasted results, calculated bids, and automatically pushed those changes. Executing on all of this unified data created the unique and new ability to accurately and automatically focus on the desired goal: LTV optimization.

Business Outcomes

The QuanticMind platform doesn’t only help Pet Circle to automate and scale up manual PPC efforts, it provides a data infrastructure solution that creates a richer view of the customer journey. This ultimately powers PPC bidding that is optimized towards those important, customer-centric metrics.

With integrations from their most influential and business-critical data sources plugged into the QuanticMind platform, the Pet Circle team has discovered a new way to intelligently place ads; one that drives happy customers towards repeat purchases.

Customer experience comes in a variety of styles: product quality, brand identity, company mission and values… but in this case, it’s being positively influenced in a data-driven way by top-of-funnel marketing. When reflecting upon QuanticMind’s role in the Pet Circle marketing organization, Mike says:

It’s helped SEM—our biggest growth channel—become more scalable and cost-efficient, requiring less manual manpower to manage.

The specific targets and goals differ depending on the campaigns and product categories, but using QuanticMind, Pet Circle’s search team is able to achieve target ROAS and LTV goals across their program. “If you’re spending a significant amount as a LTV-centric E-commerce company and spending a lot of hours manually adjusting bids, QuanticMind is a solid solution” Mike shares.