E-commerce has come a long way from that first ‘Sting’ CD purchased in 1994 and here at Colewood, we all enjoy some online shopping whether it’s to update our wardrobe or grab the latest tech. While online retail has been growing in popularity, how has e-commerce been impacted during the national lockdowns? And how have the staff at Colewood been working with clients to help boost their online sales to new heights?
In this blog, we will be exploring how the online shopping landscape has changed and created lasting effects to retail overall due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns that followed.
E-commerce During Lockdown
In the UK last year, the online share of retail sales rocketed from 15.8% in 2019 to 23.3% in 2020. As the graph below shows, the revenue generated by internet retail sales largely increased over the course of 2020, hitting a peak in November with a value of £3,272.1m coming from online shoppers.
There was a dip in the revenue from online sales during July to October as restrictions in the UK eased and people were now going back out to pubs, restaurants and leisure facilities rather than struggling to make banana bread (I even managed to burn the tin!) and waiting for parcels to arrive.
However, even with these new freedoms, internet retail sales did not just go back down to pre-pandemic levels. For example, revenue from retail sales in August 2019 was £1,331m, whereas, in August 2020, the figure was around 1.5x more at £2,043m; this highlights that e-commerce was still proving popular despite restrictions easing as people find it easier to be able to surf the internet, fill baskets and purchase items all from the comfort of their own home.
Jasmine Silk- Colewood Helping Sales Soar Through Paid Search
Like a lot of businesses, lockdown in March meant that staff at Colewood had to quickly adapt to working from home but with support on hand through Zoom, a can do attitude and some new furry four legged co-workers for the team we managed to make 2020 on Google Ads one of the best years for our e-commerce clients!
Jasmine Silk is an example of one of these clients. They are a family run company that specialises in providing their customers with the finest quality silk bedding and bed linen, all of which is manufactured by Jasmine Silk’s parent company based in the Hangzhou region of China.
The company was established when it became apparent that UK customers were unable to buy high-quality silk products at reasonable prices and the decision was made to open up a Jasmine Silk branch in the UK.
Jasmine Silk were first introduced to Colewood in 2013 where we created a structure for success by introducing a SKAG’s (Single Keyword Adgroups) strategy and restructuring the search to more manageable campaigns as well as restructuring the shopping utilising the account data to promote best selling products which were split out into their own ad groups. With regular and data driven optimisations we have seen continued growth in the ads account.
When lockdown hit in March 2020, non essential shops were told to close which presented a great opportunity for more consumer activity to take place online. With this in mind, Colewood sprang into action. Through continuous work and optimisations in our client’s Google Ads account, we saw the following increase in 2020 from 2019:
- clicks increased by 97.07%
- transactions by 109.30%
- revenue by 77.83%
- paid search assisted transactions by 100.51%
Even as restrictions ease across the UK and we begin to go back to normal, it doesn’t seem like the e-commerce landscape will follow suit as it remains more popular than it was pre-pandemic.
As the graph below shows, when comparing data for Jasmine Silk in May 2021 compared to May 2019 we can still see improvements from paid search with a 99.02% increase in transactions and a 63.83% increase in revenue as well as a rise of 61.23% in assisted transactions from Google Ads.
In summary, we have seen online sales and e-commerce skyrocket across 2020 with popularity remaining higher than in 2019 despite lockdown restrictions easing. Jasmine Silk is a prime example of how having a great Google Ads strategy can help businesses unlock the full potential of the growing e-commerce scene.
With transactions from paid search up by 135.7% and a revenue increase of 86% in 2021 so far compared to the same time 2019, Jasmine Silk shows the great impact a successful ads strategy can have as we see online retail continue to rise.
If you would like to know more about how we could help with your PPC services, contact us today for more information.
