Data Power as a crises remedy

About New Look

New Look was founded back in 1969 and is now one of the largest fashion chains in the UK. In the women's clothing segment for the target group aged between 18 and 44, New Look is the second largest retailer in the UK. The retailer not only offers its fashion items locally in almost 500 stores in England and Ireland but also operates an online store and an app, with almost 240 million visits in 2022. The online store provides shipping worldwide. More than 10,000 employees work for New Look. Through its social media channels, the fashion retailer reaches over six million followers. The brand stands for trendy women's and men's fashion with a strong focus on sustainability and diversity.

Case Study New Look

How New Look uses the cannibalizations report to monitor trends

New Look's online marketing team first used Ryte when they were building a new website and revamping their online store. Even in this early phase as a Ryte "newbie", the team around Sam Pennington recognized the possibilities that the platform offers, especially for online fashion retailers like New Look. From the very beginning, the focus was particularly on the analysis possibilities related to page performance and keyword performance, respectively.

For New Look, as a fashion eCommerce company, it is important to anticipate trends. One of the main objectives is to "merchandise the website". In other words, always align the products on the website with the latest trends and the desires of the target group. For example, the offer at New Look varies and is determined by factors such as the gift-giving season (Christmas), the weather (winter, summer, warm, cold temperatures, etc.), or the festive season (New Year's Eve). 

With Ryte, New Look has the chance to find out which pages are performing well organically via keyword and page performance. The team can likewise conclude historical data as to which pages could have performed better. Based on this, the SEO and content team can readjust the content for the next season. 

But for New Look, it's not just retrospective data that plays an essential role. Ryte also enables the team to create forecasts for trends or to develop new categories in the online store with the help of the forecasts. For New Look, Ryte is a resource that runs permanently in the background and is always available for analysis. The Ryte data is looked at holistically. This means that the results of the forecasts not only impact content production or SEO measures but the sales team is also immediately involved. 

By using Ryte, the retailer was able to achieve its key goals for 2022: To maintain sales levels (no growth targets were assigned due to current and past crises) and not to lose traffic share, i.e. to maintain previous levels of traffic.

For New Look, the key KPIs include branded and non-branded traffic in addition to keyword and page performance. It is always a great challenge for the company to differentiate between these two types of traffic. 

With Ryte, they found a solution to this very issue. While it is only possible with the Google Search Console to break down branded and non-branded traffic via regex, Ryte offers the possibility to create keyword segments. For Sam Pennington, this is a clear advantage, because it makes the allocation of traffic much less error-prone. Sam Pennington says: "Ryte gives us the ability to analyze data in a completely different way and more efficiently than we can with Google Search Console alone. The way the real Google data is prepared and presented is something I haven't seen in any other tool. I and my team are delighted that Ryte is making our job much easier in this regard." 

For the SEO team, however, Ryte's Cannibalization Report provided even more critical added value. Since New Look sells fashion both online and offline, store analysis plays an important role. With the Cannibalizations Report, New Look can analyze site links of the individual stores depending on the device used. 

Ryte hack:

The cannibalization report shows which search queries have more than one ranking URL. For example, if users search for "New Look London", not only the URL for the page to the New Look store in London is listed, but also the site links in the search snippet. So New Look uses the cannibalization report to find out which site links are displayed for certain search queries to the local stores.

This way, search intent can be determined depending on the location of each store. The marketing teams can then draw important conclusions locally to design the on-site store offering. New Look has thus developed a real live hack for the Ryte platform and shows what potential Ryte can offer retailers both online and offline. 

At New Look, the team is convinced that the journey with Ryte is far from over: "So far, we may have just used 40 percent of Ryte. But that 40 percent has already helped us 100 percent in meeting our two key marketing goals for 2022. So we're looking forward to a new year with Ryte and are excited to discover more hacks." says Sam Pennington, Senior SEO Manager New Look.