Jelly Belly’s 600% eCommerce Rise

Jelly Belly needed to evolve from a beloved brand into a true eCommerce powerhouse. The goal: dramatically expand their online presence, drive meaningful revenue through their direct-to-consumer site, and improve visibility in search to reach more candy lovers than ever. To get there, we had to revamp both their organic and paid search strategies—and layer in paid social to amplify reach and results.

Sweetening eCommerce Revenue Through SEO

In 2017, Jelly Belly, the company renowned for their jelly beans, was gearing up to dominate not just in-store sales, but also eCommerce. A vision to surpass the traditional boundaries of the business led them to partner with Go Fish, a digital growth expert. The goal was clear: to identify and seize significant digital growth opportunities while adhering to revenue, budget, and marketing efficiency goals.

The SEO strategy built by Go Fish centered around creating and retaining a market stronghold for Jelly Belly’s flagship products. Go Fish achieved this by first focusing on branded terms and producing SEO-optimized content for those keywords and topic clusters.

An integral part of the strategy was creating blog content for broader search terms—like ‘sugar-free jelly beans’ or ‘Easter basket candies’—that would pique the interest of new customers who may not be looking for Jelly Belly-specific products. The addition of FAQs secured the first position in search results for key search terms and reinforced Jelly Belly’s status as the market leader.

To broaden reach and capture more top-of-funnel consumers, Jelly Belly also began targeting nonbranded terms, including less specific candy keywords. These smart strategies led to a sweet YoY surge in organic performance. Organic traffic increased by 349%, organic search revenue skyrocketed by 694%, while conversions jumped by 671%.

Scaling Paid Search Spend for Continued Success

When it came to paid search, Go Fish built upon Jelly Belly’s successful SEO strategy. To ensure paid search efforts were driving revenue and remained in line with the client’s budget, Go Fish began with an analysis of Jelly Belly’s online customers, identifying what search queries meant they were ready to buy.

These findings drove both web content optimizations (for SEO) and the focus on paid search terms that indicate purchase intent (jellybean color, bag size, flavor, and more!). This approach allowed for higher investment in paid search while retaining excellent marketing efficiency and generating consistent revenue.

Jelly Belly’s paid search strategy drove 286% more traffic, 574% more conversions and 747% more revenue with a 765% return on ad spend from the paid channel.

Tapping Into Smart Meta Strategies to Drive Conversion

Go Fish took a very selective approach to Meta that focused on consumers who were ready to buy. To get it right, we conducted creative testing to understand what offers, imagery, and value propositions motivate Meta users to buy.

The results from the testing shaped Jelly Belly’s Meta strategy; the client uses historical data to determine which discount levels and product pairings are most likely to convert users into purchasers, and only those offers are advertised on Meta.

This data-backed approach to paid social has generated a 498% return on ad spend for Jelly Belly, ensuring the brand continues to hit their Meta efficiency goals.