Ski & Trek Case Study

The Brief

Ski & Trek became a client of I-COM in 2009. Both keen skiing and snowboard enthusiasts, the business's owners had invested in an “off-the-shelf” e-commerce site, launching the online skiwear site www.ski-trek.co.uk.

Their initial model was to retail branded ski wear to the “price conscious” family market. In Oct ’09 Ski & Trek’s immediate focus was to invest £10,000 in online marketing to bring about maximum returns through the 09/10 Ski Season. This return would then provide the financial basis on which to further develop the business. Ski & Trek were also prepared to further invest in online marketing activity should the returns be generated quickly during the season.

The challenge for I-COM was to deliver the highest return possible during the 6 months of this seasonal market.

The Solution

Our initial evaluation of the Ski & Trek website revealed that it was fairly effective considering its basic functionality and initial cost, however the taxonomy of products and categories was confusing and required streamlining. The content management system delivered the basics needed to restructure content. There were many fundamental errors in terms of on-page SEO implementation and the site was also weak in terms of link profile and Google Pagerank.

Our competitor and wider market research together with ongoing input from Ski & Trek suggested the product would be very competitively priced.

Our recommendations involved directing the majority of the initial marketing budget in to a paid search campaign (PPC), accompanied by some work on developing the authority of the domain as well as basic on-page SEO activity and on-page SEO training to the Ski & Trek team.

From a usability perspective we revised the way product categories were listed in the site to give more logical and user-friendly navigation paths. From a search perspective we applied best practice on-page SEO implementation to a number of the higher level pages, whilst also providing training to the Ski & Trek team to allow them to roll-out basic tagging and labelling across all pages of the site.

However, the main focus of our activity was to implement a targeted PPC campaign. Initially we aimed to spend around £1500 per month with Google Adwords.

The Results

Our PPC campaign quickly generated fantastic returns delivering a conversion rate of between 3-4% and a marketing ROI of 10.

This superb start to the campaign allowed the Ski & Trek team to plough more funds derived from sales straight back in to the PPC marketing budget. Increased spend allowed our Adwords team to improve impression share across the targeted search terms. Meaning our campaign had even greater capacity to generate sales. Our constant monitoring of analytics and tweaks applied to the campaign meant our team could maintain conversion and ROI and actually further improve performance as we moved through December and in to January.

The results of the PPC performance through the 09/10 Ski season provided the financial means to allow Ski & Trek team to place firm orders with outdoor wear suppliers to provide a fantastic product range for targeting spring / summer of 2010.

In their second full year Ski & Trek have gone from strength to strength. Search engine marketing visits have increased by 322% in line with increases to sales between November-December 2009 and November-December 2010. We continue to work hand-in-hand with the Ski & Trek team and expect to do so for the long term – building both the profile of the brand and the business's revenue.

In 2011 Ski & Trek will launch their new, bespoke website. Designed and developed by I-COM to perform superbly in the natural search results pages while influencing stronger conversion rates than ever before. This will be supported by ongoing SEO, PPC, Online PR and a re-branding and re-positioning of the social media offering to further the lure of the Ski & Trek across all online channels.

We aim to work tirelessly with the Ski & Trek team in developing their brand, in order to make this company a house-hold name.

Watch this outdoor space!