Growth Strategy & Operation for Pet Food No.1 Brand
Case Study
As the product owner, I was responsible for revenue improvement strategies for a top-tier international pet food brand. While overseeing the team, I led the following initiatives from planning to executing myself.
Challenges
The business was underperforming compared to the previous year with a 30% decrease in revenue from peak levels, a 70% reduction in new customer acquisition, and a declining number of loyal customers.
During this period, several events occurred, such as website renewal, price revisions (price increases), and the end of the COVID period, making it difficult to pinpoint the causes.
The website was managed by the headquarters' development team, preventing frequent content changes or improvements.
Strategies & Actions
1. Improvement of UX/UI
Enhanced the home page and category page content to make it easier for new customers to find the products they were searching for. Due to long lead times for requests to headquarters, we utilized third-party tools to allow us to modify the contents on the Japanese side.
During the website refresh, all review content was deleted, so we manually added about 1,000 product reviews.
Added video contents to specific product pages to boost the page performance.
2. SEO Improvement
As multiple websites were operated in the same brand, the Ecom site ranked second in branded search query. We improved meta titles and descriptions, optimized the page with on-page SEO, and achieved a first-place search ranking.
After the website refresh, 80% of product category pages were deleted, which lowered search rankings on long-tail branded terms. We created the number of category pages by adding new features to the Ecom system in cooperation with the headquarters' development team.
3. Advertising Operation Improvement
The challenge was below-target sales and low ROAS. We expanded the target audience from new customers to existing customers and started awareness campaigns (Google Discovery Ads and Yahoo Display Ads) besides the previous SEM advertising.
Requested the headquarters' data team to improve tracking with Google Tag Manager and changed the automatic bidding settings in Google Ads from CPA to ROAS target.
4. Campaign Execution
Started “500-yen coupon for new member registration” campaign, to improve the overall performance for all channels.
Executed novelty campaigns and product review campaigns bi-monthly.
5. Data Analysis
Since Google Analytics was not being utilized in the team, we fixed tracking errors, created dashboards, and visualized performance by marketing channel.
Used APIs to consolidate Google Analytics, advertising, and EC data into Google Spreadsheets and monitored changes in metrics weekly.
Conducted user surveys, collected 7,000 valuable feedbacks to identify reasons for user dissatisfaction and departure, and identified price as the biggest issue. Negotiated with other departments by creating a document highlighting that users could purchase the same products at a 30-40% lower price on other sites.
Results
The initiatives over six months led to an approximately 10-15% monthly sales improvement.
The number of new customer acquisitions doubled, and the trend of loyal customers shifted from declining to rising, showing about a 6% increase compared to before my involvement.
