The Secrets Behind Casper's 1.9 Million Monthly Visitors

In this article I'll be looking at the original bed in a box mega store, Casper.

You'll learn.

The 3 stage SEO approach that Casper use to grow.
The mega traffic pages that reach people looking to buy today (for free).
How I'd grow the revenue of Casper (they are missing a big trick).

Let's dive in.

What's Casper?

Casper is a DTC mattress business with a valuation of over $1 billion.

It's now publicly listed, but its founders started by maxing out their credit cards before getting an investment.

There is one issue though, Casper was made famous by not making money.

Yes, this is a DTC brand that even though is publicly listed, has drawn heavy criticism for not making investors any money.

Which is sad, because it has a huge fan base and is well liked.

Today they are not only a DTC brand and have stores but we'll keep to their online presence for this sudy.

But, in this case study I'll also look at ways they could reduce their advertising spend and in the process increase demand too.

The Perfect Organic Marketing Mix

When I see a traffic mix of around 39% commercial and 47% informational, I dive in straight away because that's a perfect mix.

While it's true that these kinds of traffic splits can't be achieved by every brand, for DTC (direct to consumers) brands, it is more likely than less.

So, what's happening?

Category Research Turns into Mental Availability

If you haven't read my post on how SEO actually works it's worth a read because it'll make it easier to understand my approach to SEO.

However, in micro-recap.

SEO reaches people ready to buy today and captures them.
SEO also reaches people looking at buying but doing research.
SEO can also reach people not in the market at all.

Casper's SEO strategy works on all 3 levels.

They rank for terms where people are researching, buying and also not in the market.

Take this article aimed at people, not in the market, to buy.

This article generates at least 11,000 monthly visitors a year targeting questions on sleep.

I do think that they could insert product images and certainly expose more people to their products with in-content ads, but you can't argue with the reach, which will offer retargeting options.

But equally, they rank for the important buyer terms such as mattress.

This monster search term sees Casper rank around position 5.

And this is what I want to discuss next.

How Casper Leverages the Compounding Benefits of SEO

According to Ahrefs, their mattress page is generating the equivalent PPC cost of $1,380,000 per year.

It does look like they're also spending heavily on PPC for this page as well, which, if profitable, is fine, but there's a strong argument that given this traffic, they should switch off the ads (like Airbnb has done) and focus on brand marketing.

The important thing to look at is that their organic presence gives them choice.

However, Airbnb's chief executive said this:

“We think of performance marketing as more of a way to laser in to balance supply and demand rather than a way to just purchase a large amount of customers,”

And it's working.

They've reduced their reliance on paid search and instead placed their budgets into digital PR.

Stating:

“PR is actually probably the most important channel to build the brand of Airbnb,”

So, how could Casper leverage the Airbnb approach?

Why Always On Digital PR is Highly Effective

I'm going to divert a little here from the breakdown to discuss why digital PR matters.

When brands like Airbnb focus their budgets less on performance and more on digital PR, we need to look at why?

Digital PR is the art of improving a brands relationship with the public, through digital media.

Through stories, thought leadership and data, digital PR tells the story of your business and the media use this information to drive people to their media websites.

At an SEO level, this strengthens websites, helping to boost rankings and traffic.

At a brand level, it increases fame.

Here's a case study to show digital PR in action.

And when you have a page 1 ranking for a big keyword, such as Casper does, you need to consider not if the PPC is delivering profit, but if that profit is enough to justify the payment to Google.

This requires marketing managers to look beyond the analytics dashboard.

We know that most PPC is measured on last click (it's disappearing soon, which should be interesting). As such, with Casper bidding on terms for matresses (even though they have an organic presence) it's likely that many clicking on their ads WOULD HAVE PURCHASED ANYWAY, THROUGH THEIR ORGANIC LISTING.

I placed the above in capitals because this seems to be something that marketers struggle to understand.

So what happens if you do turn off ads?

Turning Off Your Ads...What Next?

The Airbnb strategy of using PPC in a highly targeted way and focus on digital PR to boost demand for your business/ products is smart.

Casper might be using DPR already, but if not I'd recommend moving some of their PPC spend into DPR.

When they do this, they'll see more people search for their products and also make broad searches like 'mattresses'.

This will of course activate more imediate sales, help to strengthen rankings and also drive brand awareness which will grow more sales.

Of course, I'm not in their business. It's possible they've done all of the above and tested everything, and are spending on PPC serp ads because it makes financial sense to 'double' their serp real estate.

However, often when I ask brands if they've tested turning off ads, they rarely have.

Anyway, back to the study.

The Mattress Size Guide That Gains 142,000 Monthly Visits

When it comes to mattresses, sizes and dimensions matter.

Because we struggle to mentally understand sizes, this is a page that almost everyone looking at mattresses (who is unsure of what size to buy) is likely to click on at some point.

If you are not an SEO, it's going to be hard to understand what's going on here.

This single page ranks online for 12945 keywords.

Over 2000 of them are positions 1-3.

This is a staggering amount of traffic, that would simply be too vast to go after with PPC, because while these customers are in the market to buy, they are not likely to buy right now.

They might buy in a week, 3 weeks, 6 months...you just don't know.

As such its a great chance to get in front of them with your brand.

They are in the research phase of search.

You need to think from your customers point of view.