Rebel Dawg is a pet fashion company that produces fully customizable dog tags and charms. Based in Brooklyn, New York, the company offers quiet, lightweight tags for dogs and cats in 15 shapes and colors.
Before partnering with No to the Quo, Rebel Dawg found themselves in the midst of a major PPC problem. In hopes of gaining new customers, the company had partnered with a Google Ads program to set up ad campaigns for their custom pet tags. Despite partnering with supposed “ad experts,” the company experienced abysmal results. In a given month they were spending $6,000 on Google Ads, yet their return on ad spend (ROAS) was at best just 1.5x.
To make matters worse, Rebel Dawg’s other marketing channels were also underperforming. Their email campaigns only saw a 7% conversion rate, and the website suffered similar problems. Click-through-rate (CTR) for organic search traffic was just 4%. When visitors did land on the site organically, they didn’t stick around for long either. Bounce rate for organic search traffic was over 60%, meaning more than half of all visitors left the site after visiting a single page. Overall, visitors were spending just around 2 minutes on the site.
Ultimately, Rebel Dawg was spending $50 to land a new customer. Considering that the price of one of their high-end pet tags caps out near $50, and with many products well under that pricepoint, these were unacceptable results.
No to the Quo began working with Rebel Dawg in the spring of 2020. Our first priority was to immediately rebuild their ad account and optimize their ad campaigns. We took a balanced approach that leveraged paid search, display ads, and YouTube. In addition to targeting new customers, we also set up custom campaigns that retargeted past customers who had not visited the site for some time. In that way we could capture some conversions that were lost with their previous campaigns, ensuring that their prior efforts weren’t a total loss.
No to the Quo’s strategy also included efforts aimed at significantly improving Rebel Dawg’s SEO performance.
When optimized in tandem, PPC and SEO provide a “one-two punch”. Because each tactic utilizes different strengths and strategies, focusing on both SEO and PPC at the same time allowed Rebel Dawg to target a greater diversity of keywords. Keywords that had high volume but were more difficult to rank for organically could be utilized in paid ad campaigns. Meanwhile, by improving their SEO, Rebel Dawg was able to increase the number of keywords they ranked for on the first page of Google, which in turn led to an improvement in the amount of organic search traffic they were able to capture and convert into sales.
By partnering with No to the Quo, Rebel Dawg was able to reduce their monthly spend from $6,000 to $3,000 while dramatically increasing their return on ad spend. Within the first 60 days of rebuilding their ad account and bringing it to a healthier, more balanced state, Rebel Dawg saw an immediate increase in ROAS, from a maximum of 1.5x ROAS on their best month to an initial 2-4x. Over the course of the next six months, No to the Quo tracked the performance of the ads and optimized the campaigns to make Google Ads their best performing ad platform. Eventually, we were able to get Rebel Dawg to a place where they regularly experienced an 8-10x ROAS, dropping their spend to land a new customer from $50 to a much healthier $12.
Rebel Dawg also saw significant growth in the performance of other channels. Email conversion rate jumped from 7% to 15%. SEO improvements also led to an increase in the amount of time visitors spent on the site. Bounce rate dropped from 60% to 40% with time on site doubling from 2 to 4 minutes, indicating that a higher number of visitors were looking at more pages on the site and spending more time shopping.
No to the Quo’s efforts were able to remedy Rebel Dawg’s immediate situation by optimizing their paid ad campaigns, while setting them up for long-term success by improving their SEO.
