How Brill Media helped a home goods brand win back its own name
Ecommerce: Home & Entertaining
Owning the Search Result
Overview
Turn a beloved product into a direct-to-consumer engine
This direct-to-consumer home products and entertaining brand had something most advertisers would envy: a product that customers keep buying, across seasons, and across occasions.
But demand wasn't reaching the brand's own digital storefront. Searches for their products returned a variety of resellers, marketplace listings, and retail partners.
Great for resellers, but bad for margins.
The brand had done a great job becoming relevant to its audience.
The company had no paid media infrastructure of its own to control its own growth.
Brill Media built the infrastructure necessary to take digital ecommerce sales from zero to the highest-margin channel the brand had.
Responsibilities: Media Strategy, Media Management, Creative Development, Measurement Infrastructure, Message Validation
Challenges
Winning back demand the brand had already created
Retailers Outbidding the Brand: A search for the brand's own name surfaced a page of other sellers buying that term. The brand built a following that channel partners were benefiting from. The company was losing its most important Google Search traffic to the partners it supplied.
No Paid Media Foundation: The company had no ad account, Merchant Center, or shopping feed. Conversion tracking was broken by platform changes to checkout, with no clear owner internally to fix it.
Margin Leakage to Marketplaces: Demand was converting outside their owned storefront. Marketplaces and retail partners sold products rather than on its own store, where the economics are meaningfully better.
Concentrated Seasonality: Holidays drove the year, but customers were buying all year since the product served multiple purposes across many holiday occasions.
Solutions
Build the foundation, then defend the brand
Brand Term Defense: Search campaigns built specifically to make ecommerce controllable. Branded search became the highest engagement strategy in the account, delivering a 44% click-through rate. Massive flow of demand that was previously walking to competitors.
A Full Search Stack From Zero: Merchant Center, Shopping, Performance Max, dynamic search ads, and non-branded search stood up from nothing and connected to a live product catalog. Search alone now runs at a 17% CTR against a 1.89% account average.
Message Validation Before Spend: Before money was spent on advertising, message testing was deployed. Tests were done to confirm the images, problem statements, solution statements, and ad combinations that resonated most with buyers. Messages tested with real audiences were run so the brand learned what actually converts, rather than guessing based on what looks good in a deck. The top ads were not the polished studio photography. The data was allowed to win.
Channel Expansion on Evidence: After launching with Google Search, new channels were added, including: Meta, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and programmatic banners. These channels were layered in as performance justified them, with retargeting running to keep repeat purchases coming.
Key Results
Performance that compounds
13.88x Return On Ad Spend
Every dollar of media returned nearly fourteen.
$1,723,363 Revenue
Generated on $124,130 in ad spend.
18,676 Purchases
At a $6.65 cost per purchase, across 12.7 million impressions.
Impact
From invisible to unavoidable
The brand now controls their ecommerce store. They successfully opened a key new channel connecting to immediate buyers. Direct to consumer sales is now their highest margin business. They retain customer connection across seasons, rather than just the end of year holidays. What began as a business with no ad account and no way to measure a sale is now a compounding direct-to-consumer engine. Their product's natural pull is finally matched by the infrastructure to capture it.
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