Travel Luggage - $5.1k/mo
How you could grow a travel luggage ecommerce store in the run up to summer
With pent up consumer demand for travel, and many households having saved up otherwise disposable income over the pandemic, now is an ideal time to get exposure to travel-related ecommerce.
While search interest in terms like suitcases and luggage may have been severely depressed over the last year, it’s hard to believe that volume won’t be back where it was 12 months from now.
This drop in demand is going to affect incumbents, which makes it an ideal time to push a challenger brand in this space, as demand rises back. Think of it this way; demand is almost certain to rise somewhere between 3-4x over the next year - how many spaces can you say that for?
Keyword analysis
You can see the top 25 non-brand search keywords in the space here, along with an estimate of click prices at the top and bottom of each results page.
It’s really phenomenal to see how low some of the lower bid estimates are, given the potential for high AOVs in this space. It suggests that almost all of these keywords are under-bid right now, due to less than 4 advertisers seriously competing on these terms.
Campaign build
I’ve put together a typical campaign build that you might use to sell travel luggage via paid search. You can find it here.
If you’re not familiar with this type of spreadsheet, it’s basically a list of keywords and ads that you can upload into a search ads platform to start bidding on relevant keywords.
Each keyword has its own tailored ad copy, meaning you can serve relevant ads on every keyword that you’re bidding on. This might cost you hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars from a marketing agency.
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Targeting strategies
This is fundamentally a difficult category to target, as the main factor which would influence a user’s likelihood of converting (booking an upcoming holiday) is one for which ad platforms won’t have strong signals.
You might look to audiences of frequent travellers on platforms like Facebook Ads, but in reality these are just going to pick up on users who are already still travelling, and so may have less need for new luggage.
The key here is likely going to be a combination of being conservative on the paid search bids, starting low to get the traffic in, and then running retargeting campaigns to that traffic. The fact that this is a higher-AOV product is going to mean that conversion times are longer, and so there’s plenty of potential to retarget people in the 7 or 14 days after they’ve visited your store.
Profit forecasting
So, what sort of profit and ROI could you expect to see if you built a brand around travel cases?
I’ve put together an interactive dashboard here which lets you forecast the profit you could make from running paid search campaigns in this niche.
You can adjust the inputs along the top of the dashboard to see how different conversion rates, margins, and bids would affect your results. If you’re unsure, you can enter ranges for the inputs, and your outputs will be displayed as probability distributions.
The numbers in the dashboard rely on forecasting data from Google for the relevant keywords. They’re also just projecting profits on Google search ads, not including any other channels, so are really a lower estimate of the volume you could generate.
Creative Strategies
You’re going to have a hard time getting people excited over something like a piece of luggage, so I think the way to go here is to tie the luggage into the aspirational nature of travel. Creatives that are travel-led, and which pick up on the pent up demand for travel, are likely to be more eye-catching than a simple product shot.
In summary
That’s a quick roundup of how you could grow a brand selling travel cases online.
While the low current demand may make it look like a less interesting space to explore, the pent up demand and potential for volume to grow 3-4x over the next year makes it an intelligent choice.
You’re also likely to face less competition in this space from incumbents (who may have had ad budgets reduced permanently after the start of the pandemic) and other D2C brands (who may be put off by the suppressed volume levels currently)
If you have questions on anything above, drop me an email here and I’ll see if I can help. Also get in touch if you have any ideas or requests for what to analyse in future weeks.
Thanks for reading.