Ascent Protein grew revenue on its e-commerce site by double digits YoY.
The Challenge
Ascent Protein is a Denver-based nutrition company on a mission to naturally improve athletic performance. Ascent’s launch included a go-to-market strategy that included direct to consumer sales via e-commerce, but over the course of the initial three years, the brand wasn’t seeing the return on investment (ROI) in SEM or SEO that it knew was possible. The standard ingredients of brand success were present: they had a great product and enjoyed strong brand positioning. But — the missing element was a partner who could help build and execute a digital marketing strategy for growth. An additional, and significant, challenge for Ascent (and indeed a majority of brands) has been the market unpredictability that has accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. But, across wild market ups and downs, the brand was able to grow across direct to consumer channels.
Insights
- During initial conversations with the brand, Parallel Path provided a deep analysis of Ascent’s historical approaches to Paid Search and built models around an incremental growth plan to demonstrate how the agency could leverage its proprietary approach to Search Query Optimization to achieve the brand’s ambitious goals for revenue growth. This is how Parallel Path approaches every new prospective client relationship: with an eagerness to learn, because no two clients are the same.
- To begin, Parallel Path researched the data behind all the historical search queries Ascent was able to serve an impression on. Here’s why: by learning more about the Search Query history, Parallel Path is able to then hyper-target audiences, effectively eliminating waste and aligning the path to conversion. Unlike most other marketing channels, Paid Search is a pull medium rather than a push medium. Searchers express their unique intent to Google actively seeking something very specific. By analyzing the historical paid search data, Parallel Path is able to rebuild the paid search account to reduce cost per click and cost per conversion while increasing conversion volume.
- Parallel Path’s goal is to perfectly deliver on their consumer’s “ask” (search query) in order to maximize the opportunity to capture and convert each search impression. To thrive in this dynamic and hyper-competitive arena, brands need to be able to strive to “hit the nail on the head” every time or they will waste media dollars.
- Once Parallel Path created a model for Paid Search growth, the agency was charged with proving it by achieving a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) goal.
The Solution
Only 30 days after deploying Parallel Path’s new Paid Search Account, the brand was seeing a 3:1 return on advertising spend consistently.
However, one month does not make a successful program. We maintained and continued to optimize Ascent’s Paid Search account through our data-driven optimization process. As a result, the partnership has moved forward incrementally as planned, from crawling to walking and towards running: increasing the brand’s revenue through Paid Search while still achieving ROAS goals.
Parallel Path’s initial SEO strategy focused on the goal of driving increase revenue from organic search by zeroing in on two core areas (1) a technical audit of the website that assures that pages are discoverable by search engines (2) aligning the development of product pages and product page content with search interest and intent. Aligning on-page content to relevant search queries increases the likelihood of conversions.
Results
Ascent’s Paid Search and Organic Search channels for direct to consumer sales are two of their best-performing channels. With Parallel Path’s proven process to maximize search ROI, the sky’s the limit for how much this brand can grow.
