Bidvest Waltons is a leading stationery and office supply business that caters to businesses and individual consumers.
- 138% Increase in monthly store revenue
- 90 + LinkedIn Leads Generated
- 460 + Facebook Leads Generated
In recent years they’ve ramped up their B2C offering, with a particular focus on school supplies for students.
Introduction
Syte Marketing Case Study – Bidvest Waltons
Bidvest Waltons have an incredible footprint across South Africa as the leaders in stationery, office furniture and technological items.
We were tasked with increasing their B2C online store sales and increasing their inbound leads for the opening of corporate accounts.
What Approach Did We Use to Solve Their Problem?
For the online store:
In order for the online store to succeed we needed to bring:
- The right traffic
- Ensure as much of that traffic was converting as possible
What did we do for traffic:
Google Campaigns:
We ran Google search, dynamic, Gmail and display campaigns. We built cold, warm and smart audiences based on peoples interaction with the website, past customer lists and interest groups showing a propensity for stationery purchases. We then used bid adjustments based on these interest groups and combined that with a target keyword approach to ensure the best results.
Facebook Campaigns:
We built audiences based on:
- Remarketing lists
- Remarketing Lookalikes
- Past customer lists and lookalikes
- Cart Abandoners
- Stationery Interest Groups
- Parents with children of certain ages.
We then crafted Ads to speak to each one of these audiences
LinkedIn Campaigns:
We built cart abandonment audiences combined with remarketing lists with unions of specific job titles (procurement managers, buyers, owners of small businesses) to craft the perfect audience. We then ran lead generation campaigns and direct e-commerce conversion campaigns to get as many high quality leads as possible.
Conversion Optimization:
We ran:
- Google Analytics – To see where the major drop-off points of the website were.
- Video Recording Software – To actually see why these people were dropping off at these points
- Google Optimize – To make changes to problems we detected and create A/B and personalisation experiments to test our hypothesis before pushing the changes to the developers.
Traffic and Conversion Optimisation for E-Commerce
Just bringing traffic to an eCommerce store without analysing that traffic is a big mistake.
All our traffic generation campaigns (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Instagram) were successful in bringing traffic at an acceptable cost from the outset but it wasn’t until we performed a detailed conversion analysis did that traffic start to perform and actually generate sales.
How Did We Analyse All that Data?
Watching and analysing 100,000+ web visitors per month isn’t a realistic task. It was important to break each campaign into it’s individual parts and analyse each campaign separately. i.e. To analyse each Facebook audience independent of each other.
It was also crucial for us to watch only high intent users (people that had reached the cart or checkout pages but hadn’t successful transacted). It is near impossible to understand a user’s intent before getting to a high “payment-intent” page like this.

