BiGDUG drives down cost of sale and save £18,266 in first month

BiGDUG is the UK’s leading online retailer for industrial warehouse racking and garage shelving. They implemented Lunio to reduce fluctuations in their average Cost of Sale, which was limiting profitability and making revenue growth through paid search more unpredictable.

BiGDUG is the UK’s leading online retailer for industrial warehouse racking and garage shelving. The company sells to more than 250,000 customers with strong year-on-year growth.

In early 2023, Paul Harvey, Head of PPC at BiGDUG, was scaling up investment in paid search, but profitability was lower than expected.

When investigating potential causes of the problem, Paul noticed large fluctuations in Cost of Sale (COS), which BiGDUG uses as their primary search performance indicator. COS represents how much is spent on advertising per pound of revenue you make.

For example if your COS is 25% you’re spending £25 on paid search for every £100 you make.

Ideally, COS should be highly predictable. But Paul noticed significant instability in the metric from month to month. So he knew this needed to be addressed.

Bringing down cost of sale

The most effective way to bring down COS is to eliminate sources wasted ad spend.

Wasted spend can arise for many reasons. For example, overuse of broad match keywords can drive large amounts of irrelevant traffic that doesn’t convert. Or failing to add a comprehensive list of negative keywords to campaigns can also be a major contributor.

But when assessing BiGDUG’s campaign structures, Paul couldn’t identify any obvious areas of concern. All the important optimisations had been made to focus ad spend towards high-intent and high-value keywords.

That’s when Paul began to suspect invalid traffic was a key factor limiting profitability. After evaluating several solutions he decided to go with Lunio based on competitive pricing and previous case studies.

Once the initial free traffic audit was complete, Paul got a data-backed estimate of the savings BiGDUG could expect based on current ad spend and identified levels of invalid traffic.

"Aside from implementing Lunio, we didn’t make any other significant changes to our campaigns. So I’m confident Lunio is responsible for the improved profitability we’re seeing. Since enabling protection conversion rates have also increased, AOVs are up, and traffic seems to be generally stronger across the board" said Paul.

The results

Once Lunio was up and running, the downstream benefits of the added layer of protection became instantly clear in BiGDUG’s paid search performance.

March 2023 was significantly better than previous months. This was due to the money saved from click fraud being automatically re-allocated to their top campaigns every month.

• £18,266 saved in first month
• 4.77% clicks shown to be invalid