Case study
Costumes.com.au
A specialist repositioning that returns 7.17x on ad spend across the year, and 8.81x when it matters most, at Halloween.
The brief
The challenge
The store had drifted into being two shops at once. Alongside the costumes sat a broad range of general party products, and that breadth was quietly working against the brand, diluting its search relevance, muddying the positioning, and making a costume specialist look like a generalist to both shoppers and search engines.
When your domain is literally Costumes.com.au, the strategy question answers itself.
Delivery
Refocus first, then amplify
The strategy was subtraction before addition: make the store unmistakably a costume specialist, then pull every channel in behind that position.
SEO
Relevance beats range
We stripped out irrelevant party-product targeting and rebuilt the site’s organic relevance around the costume categories it should own, so search engines see a specialist rather than a generalist.
Google Ads & Paid Media
Built to peak at Halloween
Halloween is the costume trade’s grand final, so campaigns, budgets and creative are engineered to peak exactly when demand does, not spread evenly across a calendar that isn’t.
Email Marketing & CRO
The same story at every step
Email activity and conversion improvements were aligned with the specialist positioning, so a shopper meets the same focused store from first click to checkout, and comes back for the next dress-up occasion.
AEO
Ready for AI-powered search
We’re preparing the brand for answer engine optimisation, structuring its content so AI search platforms can understand and surface it, the next front in how people find products.
Results
What focus is worth
The website converts 3.1% of visitors into buyers, and every figure below improved after the range was narrowed, not in spite of it. Relevance beats range.
ROAS overall
Halloween ROAS
Cost per purchase
What’s next
If your store sells everything, it ranks for nothing
The counterintuitive lesson from this one: narrowing what the store stood for grew it. If your range has drifted broad and your search relevance has drifted down, the fix probably isn’t more products or more budget, it’s a sharper answer to what you actually are.
Let’s work together
Got a store that’s drifted generalist?
Book a discovery session and we’ll tell you whether focus, budget or the website is the thing holding back your return.
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