With $1,000 as an initial investment, and ready to leave a 3-hour commute behind, the married mavericks behind Anfield Shop’s beginnings set up shop in 2010. Nine years later, they supply Liverpool Football Club fans with an extensive selection of officially licensed LFC gear. Being diehard Liverpool fans themselves, it’s been a dream come true to serve the North American segment of “the world’s biggest football family.”

Anfield Shop has seen great success in the last few years, requiring them to move to a new and more spacious headquarters. Alisha and Josh Weiss take pride in bringing people joy through their products and providing a means to make a living to their 15 employees.

Maintaining growth through major business change

“We spent a significant investment on capital,” said Alisha Weiss, President of Anfield Shop. “I originally designed the system for this 6-8 years ago, and it was not built for a company of 15.”

On top of that, Anfield has some heavy hitters to compete with online, like Amazon, Fifth Sun, and Dick’s Sporting Goods. As a small business, Anfield understood that competing with these larger competitors will always be a challenge, one that requires expert maneuvering and a heavy online presence. All of these changes consumed time, manpower, and other resources. Anfield Shop couldn’t afford to run their advertising in house. However, with all of their plans for the future, they also couldn’t afford to hand over their performance marketing to the wrong company.

All of Anfield Shop’s internal changes and new developments left little spare time in Alisha’s schedule. But she knew she could rely on Alpine. Alpine’s unique approach produced a robust campaign structure rooted in a blended strategy of search,PLA shopping, and remarketing campaigns. This blended approach allowed Alpine to diversify its efforts and target broader search terms in some channels and more specific terms in others. Due to the precision of the 12-step process, Alpine was able to analyze, plan, and modify what was already working for Anfield Shop over time. They used Anfield’s momentum to improve their results.

Before Anfield partnered with Alpine, they had a single Google Shopping campaign that was capturing largely branded and very specific long tail traffic. Alpine segmented campaigns out by product types as well as devices and implemented query-based sculpting. Query sculpting is an advanced Google Shopping strategy that involves routing and scaling bids for higher value queries.

Alpine also developed a robust, segmented search campaign strategy that provided greater coverage to all available product categories with the ability to react quickly to changes in product availability, team performance, and other internal data. Product data was also optimized according to best practices and Google Merchant Center requirements. This included, but was not limited to, adding product variants, enhancing product titles and descriptions, adding structured product categorization, leveraging custom labels and implementing custom rules to resolve data integrity and conflict issues.

Finally, various bidding strategies were tested. They determined the best approach required manual CPC layered with custom scripts that factors internal data such a stock levels, product popularity and demand, as well as product level profit margin.