A Hull marketing specialist has extended its relationship with Ann Summers after helping generate a surge in interest online.
Summit has provided paid social and search engine optimisation to the saucy national retailer for the past two and a half years, helping the high street brand navigate safe searching and grow its visibility. It also successfully appealed “over-filtering” by Google, further boosting performance.
Now the C4DI team will support the 53-year-old business with paid search too, after driving a whopping 116 per cent increase in non-brand traffic – when people arrive at the website having searched for something other than the business or product name. The work has led to Ann Summers achieving its highest visibility ever, leaving competitors trailing in the rankings.
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Carl Hutchinson, head of paid media at Summit, said: “Ann Summers initially gravitated towards Summit because of our previous experience with tightly regulated industries, such as sexual health with Durex [made by Hull founded firm Reckitt] and medical cannabis clinic,
Sapphire Medical. We understand the rules and regulations, and have the experience to make sure our client campaigns are successful and profitable, despite the challenges from platforms like Meta and Google.”
Over the past two and a half years, Summit has created authoritative and informative content that amplifies Ann Summers’ sexual wellness and empowerment ethos. However, there were still barriers when it came to search terms. Google has additional restrictions to ensure content is suitable for the audience, which restricted the results for the brand.
Following a breakthrough in December 2022, the Summit team was able to prove that the site had been too harshly filtered and Google reviewed its stance, helping to further push performance.
Summit’s head of paid media, Carl Hutchinson.“Following a Google Safe Search appeal, we also found Google was over-filtering Ann Summers’ organic results which they have rectified, meaning Ann Summers are now seeing its highest visibility scores to date. The results are incredible and Ann Summers is now one of the top performers in the industry,” Mr Hutchinson said.
“This challenge is facing many industries where there are restrictions on age related content, but Summit has been successfully able work around this to drive the highest ever organic visibility for Ann Summers, far outperforming the brand’s competition.”
Summit, launched in 2000, is also behind work for the likes of Ikea, Joules, Three, and Levi’s. Employing more than 80 staff, a management buy-out was completed a year ago, led by Martin Corcoran and Ryan Thomas. It had been acquired from founder Hedley Aylott by Dutch multi-national TCC Global in 2016. Then based in Willerby, it moved to the Fruit Market tech campus in 2021, as a prestigious first tenant of the second phase of C4DI.
