Google Broad Match Drives Impressive Results For Pompom London

The Brief

Pom Pom London (PPL) is a UK-based luxury accessories brand passionate about creating high-end but affordable pieces. They’re known for their high-quality leather bags and extensive range of interchangeable straps, giving customers a bag to go with every outfit.

We have been leading growth at PPL for nearly 4 years now since November 2019 and have helped them go from fulfilling a few orders a day in a family home, to becoming a 8-figure brand operating globally, entirely bootstrapped and at an industry leading EBITDA.

The Context

The performance marketing landscape has been changing rapidly over the past few years which in large part is driven by privacy concerns, resulting in announcements like Google Chrome deprecating 3rd party cookies for advertising measurement in the near future as well as Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework, which was rolled out in the iOS14.5 update in June 2021.

Both changes, particularly Apple’s ATT policy, have resulted in big changes in how ad platforms which drive traffic to 3rd party websites or apps, i.e. Meta and Google, can use the data they collect from users for optimising campaigns and reporting on campaign performance.

This means that both Meta and Google have had to update their advertising products to maintain their effectiveness in this new world with access to far less data.

The two big platform changes we have seen in response to this are:

• Meta’s launch of the Advantage+ campaign type, which blends prospecting, retargeting and all creative formats into one broad, conversion optimised campaign
• Google promoting a broad keyword focussed strategy, optimised with a target CPA or ROAS bid strategy

As PPLs Growth partner, we launched the Google Broad Match to test whether it could drive better results, with impressive results as we were able to double our spend with a comparable level of efficiency. This, alongside other tests like the Meta Advantage+ Conversion Lift Test is how we’re able to continuously help our partners grow.

Google Broad Match

Google is constantly evolving and updating its advertising technology to optimise campaigns for businesses and marketers. With consumer search behaviour constantly changing, Google Ads have adjusted their keyword matching to become more intuitive.

We’ve seen a positive shift towards using Broad Match campaigns over phrase match with evidence of it producing more conversions and a higher conversion value for the same budget.

The latest version of Broad Match with Smart Bidding has the biggest and highest quality data set and will upweight bids towards searches, users, and locations that it knows will convert. Broad Match doesn’t just get new search queries and irrelevant traffic; it gives Google the option to search for new search terms and new users, which, from our tests so far, is a great way to optimise your Google search.

Given our relationship with Google, we were approached about running a Broad Match specific test for PPL, and so we devised one specifically for PPL to help us understand whether we could further improve results as we continued to scale.

Test Structure

In order for us to get an accurate picture of the effectiveness of utilising broad match we ran a 50/50 A/B test, keeping everything (budget, bidding strategy, keywords) in both the base and trial the same apart from the match types as recommended by our Google reps.

The base arm of the test contained our BAU campaign setup of consolidated phrase and exact match type keywords. The trial arm contained a consolidated setup of broad and exact match-type keywords.

The Results

Over the four weeks of testing, we saw impressive results. With the same budget, we managed to double our spend but essentially keep a very comparable level of efficiency with CPA only 8% higher and ROAS only falling 11%. To put that into perspective, for a usual phrase match campaign with 50% extra spend at PPLs scale, we’d expect to see ROAS drop by 20-30% at least. Given we were over achieving PPL’s target metrics already, the Broad Match campaign was a significant win and was immediately deployed across the account as part of their wider search strategy.

Overall this test proved that Broad Match was an effective tool in PPL’s growth. So much so that we will not be running other keyword matching in their Google account in the UK, with plans to implement this structure in different regions.

As of the time of writing, we are exclusively running Broad Match in the US, a huge market for PPL, due to the positive results of this test.

What’s Next For Pompom London?

PomPom London’s success is a testament to the power of great products, consistent scaling, and iteration over time. By trusting us to test new approaches like Broad Match and continuously iterate, PomPom London have seen amazing results. As they continue to scale and expand their presence in the US market, PPL are well on track to becoming a household name.