Ping started off in 1959 as a one-man operation making putters in a garage. Today, it is one of the most recognised names in golf equipment, with a product line that includes clubs, clothing, gloves and bags. Ping innovations like perimeter weighting, heat-treated clubheads and color coding of lie and loft are now considered the standard and used by manufacturers throughout the golf industry.
"We’ve been working with the Williams marketing team to drive more traffic to our site and grow our audience online, showcasing the PING brand and our wide range of products. SEO has been a key focus, and the results in terms of organic reach and keywords ranking speak for themselves. We’ve also explored PPC, another area we required resource to set up and manage our campaigns. Williams have understood our approach to new channels and that brand comes first in everything we do, which was essential for our ecommerce journey."
95% increase in organic clicks
296% increase in no of keyword rankings
475% ROAS within first two months
One of the world’s leading golf brands, Ping dates back to the late ‘50s.The Williams Commerce digital marketing team came on board in 2021 initially helping with their digital marketing strategy, supporting the launch of their new Adobe Commerce Cloud Pro ecommerce website in March 2022, and helping them transition to Klaviyo for email marketing.
We then focussed on SEO, to increase brand visibility and organic performance for the new Ping Europe website, as well as introducing Paid Search in 2023 as a new channel for driving additional online growth.
Although PING is a household name in the sports industry, the brand is normally sold through resellers. In addition, their golf clubs require a customer to visit the store and have the clubs measured to size before they can be purchased, so the challenge was to grow the soft goods area of their brand as a direct to consumer (D2C) ecommerce store in the UK and Europe, without directly competing with their re-sellers in the process.
Ping’s ambitious plans to grow their new ecommerce website, improve online visibility and increase sales needed expert digital marketing input.
After developing a data-driven digital marketing strategy aligned with the needs of their new ecommerce website, we applied a holistic approach to SEO, starting by fixing all technical errors to help site performance in terms of crawlability, indexability and ranking effectiveness in relevant search engines both locally (UK) and internationally (Europe).
The next step was to focus on optimising the website content. The aim was to improve the visibility of an agreed list of primary keywords that are the top priority for PING’s brand. We the completed our SEO audit to improve the keyword rankings and identified opportunities to improve the site’s crawlability, indexability and ranking effectiveness. This made an important contribution to performance for relevant search engines in the UK and across Europe.
Then, we worked our way through further optimising the website, starting with the product categories that were the biggest priority from a commercial perspective. Our keyword strategy focused on mapping each page on the site with the most relevant branded and non-branded keywords, as part of the SEO optimisation.
The next stage was looking at pay per click (PPC) advertising as a brand new channel that was never used before. We provided a tailored Paid Search strategy for Ping Europe which avoids direct competition against their re-sellers via Google Shopping, and outlined how Google Ads could drive incremental growth in both website traffic and revenue. We also showed how they could reach under-served audiences such as women golfers looking for quality clothing.
Ping’s first Google Ads campaigns started in April 2023. Early results showed return on advertising spend (ROAS) increase 2.7 times to 475%, with average cost per action (CPA) halving within 2 months.
Our aim is to become a valued extension of Ping Europe’s digital marketing team and to this end we’ve been working closely together, providing regular updates and high-level data to inform fast business decisions.
In preparation for a cookie-less world we also implemented Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tracking to measure the success of the digital marketing campaigns we run. The company now has valuable insights into website traffic, keyword rankings, revenue and much more.
We also provide Ping with monthly reports in Looker Studio which collate data from multiple sources such as GA4, Google Search Console (GSC), Google Ads, SEMRush and more so they can easily make informed decisions about online improvements and website performance.
We regularly review overall revenue generated from organic searches and traffic compared with other channels. Performance measures include clicks, impressions, click through rates (CTRs) and ranking positions for each keyword. Benchmarks for landing pages and product category pages help to understand changes over time.
To optimise the site for the best possible technical performance we review speed and responsiveness for mobile devices, including Google’s Core Web Vitals indicators to help Ping maintain high quality customer experiences on their website.
Month-by-month Ping Europe has seen rankings for both branded and non-branded keywords increase, allowing them to improve brand visibility and reach new customers. Following SEO implementation, the overall number of ranked keywords increased almost 4x in the first six months. Organic clicks almost doubled and organic impressions more than trebled. The average ranking for all keywords improved by three places. We’re just at the beginning of the journey, but the trends are all in the right direction.
When it comes to PPC performance, we’ve seen the carefully curated range of online-only women’s golf clothing products become one of the biggest revenue generators for Ping in terms of Paid Search revenue. It currently accounts for over half the revenue generated by PPC, which this new channel delivering 6% of sitewide traffic and 13% of sitewide revenue within the first quarter of activity.
Success to date is largely thanks to the great working relationship between Ping and the Williams Commerce digital marketing team. The collaborative approach has created a robust digital marketing strategy tailored to the unique requirements of their brand. We’re confident the results will just keep on improving.
Contact us today for a free consultation appointment.
2021
on request
Sports & Sporting Goods
Discover how we have grown ecommerce brands online through Adobe Commerce, Magento, BigCommerce, PPC, SEO, UX, Microsoft Dynamics and system integration.
Contact us today for a free consultation appointment.
