Demo case study
Retail and e-commerce 2025
Kestrel Outdoor
A 400-product outdoor retailer replatformed off a store it had outgrown, then rebuilt its paid search around margin rather than volume.
1.4% to 2.6%
Conversion rate
Three months post-launch against the same quarter the previous year
+52%
Gross profit from paid search
Six months, on 11% lower media spend
-38%
Site search exit rate
Measured in analytics, three months either side of launch
Kestrel was doing respectable revenue on a platform that could not filter by the attributes their customers actually shopped on. Paid search was buying traffic for their lowest margin categories because that was where the volume was, and nobody had connected ad spend to gross profit.
- Filtering that could not handle size, fit and season together
- Site search returning nothing for two thirds of long-tail queries
- Ad spend concentrated in the two lowest margin categories
- No view of profit by campaign, only revenue
- 01
Replatform and migrate
Moved 412 products with their history and reviews intact, and rebuilt the category structure around how people actually shop.
- 02
Search and filtering
Attribute-driven filtering and a site search that understands their vocabulary, including the words customers use that the industry does not.
- 03
Margin-aware reporting
Connected the store, the ad accounts and their cost data so every campaign reports gross profit, not just revenue.
- 04
Rebuilt paid search
Restructured the account around margin bands, which meant spending less in two categories and considerably more in one.
The uncomfortable part was being shown that our best performing campaign was our worst performing campaign once you counted the margin. We would not have found that on our own.