©
Date
Jan 2022
Client
Aaron's
Industry
Retail / Lease-to-own
Timeline
96 Months
Challenge
There was no e-commerce category to benchmark against, and later, no proof more media spend wouldn't dilute returns.
When the engagement started in 2011, there was no online lease-to-own e-commerce site anywhere in the United States or Canada. That's a rare kind of brief: no competitor to beat, no established shopper path to optimize, no playbook to borrow. Building the storefront was the easy half; building demand for a way of buying customers had never done on a screen before was the hard half. Years later, a second challenge arrived: paid media had delivered explosive growth in 2018, and Aaron's wanted to invest harder in 2019, with a reasonable fear that pushing more money in would thin out the returns.
Solution
We made search the growth engine, then optimized media spend against margin instead of surface metrics.
Lease-to-own is a need-state purchase: people search when the refrigerator dies, when the couch gives out, when the apartment is empty. Owning that moment in organic and paid search meant owning the category before anyone else could name it. We designed and built the storefront, then ran SEO as the durable, compounding demand layer and paid search as the immediate, scalable revenue layer, staying on as a long-term digital partner rather than a project vendor. When it was time to scale in 2019, we went a level deeper than defending conversion rate and cost per acquisition: working directly with Aaron's business analytics team, we mapped true margin by product category and rebuilt the media plan around margin-adjusted return instead of surface metrics.
Process
Built the e-commerce channel first, then re-architected the media plan around category-level margin data.
The first chapter was building: designing and launching the storefront, then layering SEO and paid search on top as the primary demand engines, embedded with Aaron's team as an ongoing digital partner rather than a one-time vendor. The second chapter, roughly seven years later, was scaling: partnering directly with Aaron's business analytics team to map true margin by product category, then shifting budget into higher-CPC, lower-conversion categories where every conversion was actually worth more to the business. Optimizing to the metric the client gets paid on, rather than a reporting-friendly proxy, changed where the money went.
By the numbers
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