Fetching success for Ruffwear UK

Ruffwear originally came to us wanting to expand beyond their UK Paid Search & Social activity into Europe including Germany and France.

As an established brand in the US, they were also seeking support to maximise brand awareness in the UK. 

Initially concerned about expansion with the obstacles of tight budgets alongside translation considerations, they were on the prowl for an agency that could tackle both efficiently with international expertise.

Ruffwear chose Evolved due to our open and honest approach, logic and theory. Our first recommendation was to concentrate on improving their underperforming UK activity ahead of expanding into Europe. All while supporting their struggling organic activity with Digital PR, which would serve them better than spreading budgets thinly in new geographic areas. This was particularly important as their US results weren’t strong at the time. After recognising our expertise and experience, Ruffwear came on board despite our plans to diverge from their initial desires. 

The brand wanted us to service their paid marketing efforts and improve their organic performance through Digital PR and set clear objectives from the outset:

PPC

• Increase new acquisition growth (by 15% YoY) 
• Reduce overreliance on brand
• Generate 400% return on ad spend (ROAS) 

DPR

• Build new referring domains  
• Improve organic visibility via trusted domains 
• Gain high-quality links in relevant publications

PPC

The main goal was to drive new customer acquisition via non-brand/generic themes, step away from the overreliance on brand and influence growth, whilst seeking to improve ROAS to the agreed level.

The team worked to restructure campaigns to cleanly capture traffic for distinct brand and non-brand target themes to support their product catalogue. By doing so, we would influence the enhancement of Ruffwear UK’s bottom line i.e. ROAS and conversion rate.

Alongside an overhaul of the campaign structure, the team expanded into new campaign types to butter up the consumer journey with valuable visual touchpoints.

Digital PR 

To establish the brand as an authority in the UK and increase awareness in the right places, we had three key objectives: 

• Position Ruffwear as an industry expert 
• Build and strengthen the backlink profile 
• Become an extension of the Ruffwear team 

To do this, the Digital PR and Creative team used a thought-leadership approach,

pitching unique and extremely relevant campaigns to publications, utilising the expertise of a Ruffwear spokesperson. 

We actively monitored the news and jumped on trends to establish Ruffwear’s authority. One example includes reacting to the news of the amount of bacteria on pet toys, especially in hot weather. To add authority to the campaign, we collaborated with a vet to reveal what hidden nasties could be lurking on your beloved dog’s toys, with additional advice on properly cleaning dirty dog toys. This campaign alone generated a total of 194 backlinks. 

This played into our overarching strategy of earning coverage across trusted and relevant publications to build on the backlink profile, targeting UK publications in particular. 

On top of that, we also utilised Ruffwear’s existing onsite content to direct links to key pages, while creating fresh campaigns relevant to Ruffwear’s customers that can be promoted across multiple marketing channels. 

PPC

By increasing investment in non-branded activity, overall revenue grew 6% vs the previous period all while achieving the ROAS target of 107% which itself saw a 3% rise comparatively.

We also achieved:

• 28% increase in Conversion Rate
• 208% increase in Engagement Rate
• 18% increase in Average Order Value

DPR

Alongside positioning Ruffwear as an industry expert, we built links on 277 new referring domains, including top-tier and relevant publications, such as Country Living, Pets Mag, Yahoo, The Sun, Daily Record, Dog O’ Day, topdogtips, Pet News 2Day, DogTime and Great British Life.

Additionally, we generated links from 60 trusted domains and established ‘Britain’s Muddiest Dog’ competition, which led to hundreds of entries and some extremely cute and funny photographs, all of which were promoted across social media.