New Zealand: The land of (almost) allbirds

Munoz, J. (2020, March 13). Success story #1 allbirds - dyed in the wool simplicity. Artichoke Marketing. https://artichoke.marketing/en/success-story-1-allbirds-dyed-in-the-wool-simplicity/

Allbirds is a clothing company founded by Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger in 2016. Brown, a former New Zealand footballer (soccer player), thought up the idea for his shoes during his time as vice-captain of the New Zealand team. Brown says, "part of my job was to wear sponsored sportswear and footwear from the big apparel companies. My initial insight was that footwear had become overdesigned, over-logoed, and overly bright... so the early idea was: make a very simply silhouette" (Blakely, 2018). Allbirds' sneakers are the plainest you will ever see and contain no logos except for the sole. After his retirement, Brown teamed up with Joey Zwillinger, a renewable materials expert where they developed a sustainable wool that could be used to make sneakers (Allbirds, n.d.). They named their company after the fact that New Zealand has almost no native land mammals (only 3 species of bat) but instead mostly "all birds" (Allbirds, n.d.). Despite stemming from a Kickstarter campaign, Allbirds reached a $1.4 billion valuation in 2018 (Condron, 2018). 

Allbirds. (n.d.). Our story. Allbirds. https://www.allbirds.com/pages/our-story

SEO Strategy

    

    By being such a specific sneaker company focused on sustainability and comfort, Allbirds has been able to keep their keyword targeting narrow minded (Condron, 2018). This has allowed them to capitalize on a small amount of keywords and own them entirely. From SEMrush research, Allbirds has 206 paid keywords that bring in 100.8K website visitors (SEMrush, 2021). The simplest keyword of 'shoes' has a search volume of 1 million and brings in 46% of their traffic (SEMrush, 2021). By combining this strategy with their affiliate network (Share A Sale) to boost brand awareness, they can grow their number of backlinks in order to build up their organic strategy (Condron, 2018). Their affiliate program gives a commission rate of 15% of net sales, 15 days of cookies, and a sign up bonus of 17.5% commission for the first month in the program (Allbirds, 2021). 

Website

    

    Allbirds is also great at tagging these unique keywords to specific content on their website. Most of their top-ranking pages related to their products which improves their ranking ability for each page and their entire site as a whole (Condron, 2018). As search intent for eCommerce sites is transactional, having high ranking product pages is important for success. If a product page is presented first, a customer can be taken directly to what they want to see instead of having to navigate the site on their own. Allbirds' website is also integrated with softwares such as Google Analytics, Google Enhanced eCommerce, Google Tag Manager, Mailchimp, Facebook Pixel, and Shopify as well as a few others (Gallantway, 2019). These various softwares help with measuring website performance, content optimization, and customer acquisition (especially Google Enhanced eCommerce and Shopify). Google Enhanced eCommerce provides metrics such as product impressions, product clicks, viewing product details, adding product to cart, transactions, and refunds providing a more comprehensive view of customer behavior (Google, 2020). 

Paid Strategy 

    Allbirds capitalizes on their paid strategy by paying for variated keywords such as misspellings like 'all birds' or 'bird shoes'. From SEMrush, I discovered that Allbirds has 189 keyword variations (SEMrush, 2021). By doing this, Allbirds is showing that they know potential customers may not know their exact name, but they do know what shoes they are looking for (Condron, 2018). It is estimated that Allbirds spends around $25-30K per month on Google Ads between search, shop and display (Moons, 2021). The photo below is a display ad I encountered while reading through another article. 

Smith, L. (2021, January 9). The 18 best marketing strategies for 2021 (from the experts). Business 2 Community. https://www.business2community.com/marketing/the-18-best-marketing-strategies-for-2021-from-the-experts-02374950

Social Media Integration 

    Allbirds social media strategy revolves around customer feedback and product research (Gallantway, 2019). Facebook advertising is used to promote the release of new colors or limited edition sneakers. Last April, Allbirds used Facebook Ads to promote their new running shoe by using a 4 way split test (Facebook, 2020). Each ad creative included a shop now button as the CTA and the overall campaign resulted in a 48% increase in purchases and a 18% increase in ad recall (Facebook, 2020). From extra research on SimilarWeb, only 5.5% of their traffic comes from social media advertising so it shows that they are built more on search, direct, and referral traffic (SimilarWeb, 2021). 

SEMrush Research

    Using the domain overview tool, I found that allbirds.com has an authority score of 58, organic search traffic of 586.3K, 100.8K paid traffic, and 181.3K backlinks from 7.23K referring domains (SEMrush, 2021). From a backlink audit, Allbirds has a very low toxicity score which could indicate that their affiliate program is working well. 

SEMrush. (2021). allbirds.com: Domain overview. SEMrush. https://www.semrush.com/analytics/overview/?searchType=domain&q=allbirds.com

SEO Comparison Tool

    Using the side by side SEO tool, I compared allbirds.com and nike.com. The tool revealed that Allbirds uses a head tag, meta description, 121 linked words and 50 internal links (Internet Marketing Ninja, 2021). There were no meta keywords or h1/h2 header tags listed for Allbirds, which I suspect they are hiding. As for Nike.com, there were no elements or tags listed which I also suspect are hidden from competition since they are such a large brand. 

Internet Marketing Ninja. (2021). Side-by-side seo comparison tool. Internet Marketing Ninja. https://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/seo-compare/

Website Review & Suggestions 

    From initially viewing their website, I would say that Allbirds has a great one. The first thing I noticed in their navigation menu is that they do not have a on-page search bar. Internal search bars make visitors 200% more likely to convert thereby driving more brand loyalty and 12% of visitors who are unsatisfied with search results end up turning to the competition (Vollaire, 2019). Internal search bars are especially important for eCommerce websites because it allows customers to find what item they want quickly. Up to 30% of eCommerce visitors use the search function which accounts for around 14% of overall site revenue (Vollaire, 2019). Based on these stats, I would suggest that Allbirds include one on their website or at least try it out with an A/B test. 

    Secondly, as I was scrolling through the homepage, their 'new products' section was almost at the very bottom of the page. I would suggest that they move this part to the top of the homepage in order to see if it performs better (aka more clicks or conversions, etc). 

Conclusion

    Despite being a smaller company, Allbirds is fairing well in the world of athletics and sneakers. Allbirds is a young company with a large future ahead of them, both in terms of growth and website improvement. Their website performs great and gives a great user experience. If Allbirds were to adhere to my suggestions, I would hope that their website performance increases. 

-Kendall

References

Allbirds. (n.d.). Our story. Allbirds. https://www.allbirds.com/pages/our-story

Allbirds. (2021). ShareASale.com and allbirds, inc. Allbirds. https://account.shareasale.com/shareasale.cfm?merchantID=68246

Blakely, L. (2018, July). Why a former pro soccer player and his co-founder decided to make allbirds all about 'simplicity'. Inc. https://www.inc.com/magazine/201808/lindsay-blakely/tim-brown-joey-zwillinger-allbirds-sneakers.html

Condron, S. (2020, June 10). Allbirds weaves its brand-building expertise into seo and google ads. SpyFu. https://www.spyfu.com/blog/allbirds-weaves-branding-and-seo/

Facebook. (2020). Allbirds: Facebook ads case study | Facebook for Business. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/business/success/allbirds

Gallantway. (2019, September 12). Allbirds: A detailed growth marketing analysis on how the company acquires & converts customers. Medium. https://medium.com/gobeyond-ai/see-how-direct-to-consumer-darling-allbirds-acquires-and-converts-customers-online-77a6f4b57078

Google. (2020, June 10). Analytics for web: Enhanced ecommerce. Google. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/enhanced-ecommerce

Internet Marketing Ninja. (2021). Side-by-side seo comparison tool. Internet Marketing Ninja. https://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/seo-compare/

Moons, D. (2021, March 9). The google ads strategy of allbirds. Store Growers. https://www.storegrowers.com/allbirds-google-ads/

SEMrush. (2021). allbirds.com: Domain overview. SEMrush. https://www.semrush.com/analytics/overview/?searchType=domain&q=allbirds.com

SimilarWeb. (2021). Allbirds.com. SimilarWeb. https://www.similarweb.com/website/allbirds.com/#social

Vollaire, L. (2019, October 7). Site search and seo: How functionality creates value. Algolia. https://www.algolia.com/blog/product/site-search-and-seo/