Boots Hearingcare

The client

Boots Hearingcare is the audiology arm of Boots UK and is the leading private hearing care provider in the UK, with services in over 400 locations.

Boots Hearingcare had been with the same network agency for a number of years, but they didn’t feel they were getting the partnership approach they needed to deliver results across their digital platforms.

Hallam’s unified, strategic approach appealed to the Boots Hearingcare team, which helped us beat off competition from rival agencies at both a local and national level.

The challenge

Boots Hearingcare tasked us with delivering a 20% increase in hearing health check appointments through their website across the financial year.

This quick and free 15 minute appointment determines if someone is experiencing hearing loss, enabling Boots to make an assessment and provide crucial information or recommendations to manage any hearing-related symptoms.

The industry in which Boots Hearingcare operate also presented an obstacle, as there are restrictions around advertising healthcare products via Google.

Alongside this business objective, the biggest challenge Boots Hearingcare faced was trying to navigate COVID-19 and the issues it has caused around people being able to leave their homes – even for medical issues, such as hearing tests.

This highlighted the importance of digital communication, ensuring their audience could receive messages surrounding the rules around attending hearing tests and ensuring that they felt safe to do so.

What we did

Our strategy focused on two main objectives. Firstly, increasing the number of good quality sessions to the site. This was centred around a four-tier plan of brand building activity through paid and earned media, increasing organic traffic, increasing brand salience and lead generation advertising.

Secondly, we looked to Improve the conversion rate of the site: reducing the time to the booking screen, increasing conversion rates, testing use of incentives in advertising, increasing ecommerce conversions and improving the visibility of Boots.com .

With regard to Google’s healthcare restrictions, we also brought in a new programmatic partner, Stack Adapt, to deliver paid media for Boots Hearingcare and circumnavigate this issue.

The results

Our primary measure of success is the number of hearing health checks that are booked via the website, which we track against our annual target. To date, we are just over 40% of the way through Boots Hearingcare’s financial year, but over 85% of the way through our health check target.

Breaking it down further, we have seen at least double-digit improvements in each of the following metrics across organic, paid search, affiliates and display since we took over the account, including number of users, new users, sessions, average session duration and conversion rate.

In addition to this, to ensure we’re always focused on our client’s bottom line, we are implementing offline conversion tracking to further improve the quality of the leads we’re sending through to the Boots Hearingcare site.

Since we started working with Boots Hearingcare, we’ve achieved:

• 5.1pp increase in Share of Search in comparison to the previous year – the biggest increase Boots Hearingcare have seen since 2014
• 30.5% increase in organic sessions YoY
• 85% increase in organic transactions YoY
• 72.2% increase in hearing checks booked YoY
• 91% increase in conversion rate YoY
• 41% increase in sessions YoY

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