Cotswold Outdoor (previously Outdoor & Cycle Concepts) is an established name in outdoor retail, with recommendations already central to how they grow.
They wanted to see whether Herdify could help boost their online targeting and increase conversions, so they tested it on their Google Performance Max campaigns.
The challenge
Cotswold Outdoor digital team are always looking for ways to grow across their channels. They wanted to know whether their advertising was driving results for both their online and physical stores, and whether Herdify could help increase conversions in their Google campaigns.
There was also a question specific to how they sell. Across Cotswold Outdoor and Snow + Rock, they stock other brands like Patagonia, The North Face, Rab. So for them, a recommendation is less about which brand to buy and more about where to buy it.
The approach
Working with Cotswold Outdoor’s digital team, Herdify identified the communities where offline word-of-mouth for their stores was strongest. They took that behavioural segmentation and applied it as an extra data layer in a test Google Performance Max campaign, run alongside a control.
It was a controlled test, a way to see what word of mouth insight added to campaigns they were already running, before rolling it out further across their campaigns.
The results
Against a control campaign, the activity using Herdify saw:
+20% higher clickthrough rate
+9% higher conversion rate
-3% lower cost per acquisition
Up to a 25% uplift in return on ad spend (ROAS), by targeting where word of mouth was strong.
The benefits
Cotswold Outdoor now has evidence that community insight can sharpen their digital targeting, and a way to build on it. That means:
- Evidence, from the test data, that where an ad lands shapes how it performs.
- A place for community insight in their Google and digital campaign planning, so word-of-mouth communities shape where spend goes next.
- Spend pointed where it’s most likely to convert, turning the same budget into stronger returns.
Collaborating closely with their Digital teams, we identified communities, and our expert team of behavioural analysts advised on locations to target their marketing activities, leading to an increased ad clickthrough rate of 20%, an increased conversion rate of 9%, and a decreased cost per acquisition by 3% during the trial phase when compared against a control campaign.
“We are impressed with the results so far that we’ve seen in the trial with Herdify. We applied their behavioural segmentation to our test Google Performance Max campaign for Cotswold Outdoor and saw an uplift in ROAS of up to 25% during that trial period”
-Rob Hopkins, Head of Digital, Outdoor & Cycle Concepts
