Impression Implemented Paid Media Strategy for Rutland Cycling to Turn It up a Gear

Rutland Cycling is a leading independent chain of cycle shops. They appointed Impression in 2020 as they were looking for fresh innovative ideas to help them grow their business and wanted a hands-on partner with a culture that aligned with their own.

The Challenge

Rutland Cycling faced many challenges as a result of the pandemic; their bricks and mortar stores were impacted by lockdown restrictions and the sharp increase in demand for their products led to an ever-changing stock situation.

Impression needed to help Rutland Cycling to grow profitably, creatively structuring their approach so that they could invest as much as possible in priority areas whilst ensuring minimal wasted spend on out-of-stock products.

The Strategy

Whilst stores were closed or facing lockdown restrictions, Impression set out to implement a full-funnel strategy to drive users to Rutland Cycling’s e-commerce site, no matter what stage they were at in their journey.

• Top and mid-funnel search campaigns targeted lower-intent search queries for users that were in the research phase and interested in purchasing bikes. Higher-intent queries were targeted with search campaigns through DSA ad groups built on a dynamic page feed, restricting spending to only in-stock and high-priority products.
• Search query-filtered shopping campaigns ensured Impression maintained a high impression share for users looking for specific bike models, delivering revenue at the bottom of the funnel.
• Due to pervasive stock shortages in the cycling industry, Impression had the additional strategic challenge of restricting spending to particular products with a greater level of stock depth to prevent wasted spending, particularly through search and shopping campaigns.

The Results

Impression helped Rutland Cycling increase revenue by almost 30% despite severe stock difficulty (October 2020 – March 2021 vs the previous year).

It took a few process iterations to streamline their ways of working around identifying priority products based on an evolving stock situation, and using lists to update their campaigns accordingly.

Impression realized that by creating a centralized document for priority SKUs to be updated and dynamically pulling this into page feeds and custom labels, Impression was able to take most of the manual work out of the task allowing them to focus more on bid optimization and managing overall budget allocation to different product categories and maximizing Rutland Cycling’s retainer time.

About Impression

Impression is a multi-award-winning digital agency, specializing in the delivery of high-performance campaigns across SEO, PPC, analytics, and digital PR.