Case StudiesProtecting An Automotive Group From Internal Competition While Scaling Growth

Protecting An Automotive Group From Internal Competition While Scaling Growth

Executive Summary

The MPG Group is a global collective of specialist automotive eCommerce brands, including Rimmer Bros, Moss Europe, SNG Barratt, Moss Motors, and Moss Miata. Following multiple acquisitions under one group, they faced the challenge of scaling digital performance while managing overlapping audiences and preventing internal competition.

Individually, brands encountered key issues, from over-reliance on branded PPC and missing Google Shopping activity to tracking errors and indexing problems, limiting visibility, efficiency, and growth.

eComOne implemented a unified, multi-channel strategy across SEO, PPC, and data tracking to drive scalable growth while protecting each brand’s performance. By aligning strategy across all businesses, MPG Group achieved stronger international visibility and a solid foundation for consistent year-on-year growth.

162%

Increase in PPC revenue for Moss

27.5%

Increase in PPC revenue for Rimmer Bros

The MPG Group is a collective of leading automotive specialists dedicated to classic and performance car enthusiasts across the globe. The group comprises five distinct businesses, each with a rich heritage in supplying parts, restoration services, and expertise for a range of iconic vehicles:

  • Rimmer Bros – Established as a premier supplier of parts and accessories for British classic cars, Rimmer Bros serves a global audience of vintage car enthusiasts, offering an extensive catalogue that spans decades of automotive history.
  • Moss Europe – Specialising in European classic and performance cars, Moss Europe provides parts, restoration support, and technical expertise to enthusiasts across the continent, helping preserve the legacy of historic vehicles.
  • SNG Barratt – Known for its deep roots in the Jaguar community, SNG Barratt supplies comprehensive parts and restoration solutions for Jaguar owners, supporting the preservation of some of the most celebrated British automobiles.
  • Moss Motors – With a focus on American and European classic cars, Moss Motors delivers high-quality parts, restoration tools, and guidance to hobbyists and professional restorers alike, ensuring enthusiasts can maintain their vehicles to the highest standards.
  • Moss Miata – Dedicated to Mazda MX-5/Miata owners, Moss Miata provides a complete range of performance and replacement parts, helping keep one of the world’s most beloved sports cars in top condition.

Each business within the MPG Group (consisting of Rimmer Bros, Moss Europe, SNG Barratt, Moss Motors and Moss Miata) presented distinct challenges when collaborating with eComOne on their eCommerce strategy.

Prior to refining their PPC strategy with our team, Rimmer Bros experienced inconsistent performance across their Google Ads campaigns. The account had relied heavily on branded traffic to drive results, so our strategy focused on expanding into high-intent, long-tail keywords to build stronger, more diversified performance.

Moss Europe had no Google Shopping feed in place, meaning they were missing out on valuable conversion opportunities and visibility within Shopping results. They also had significant data tracking issues, which we resolved to ensure marketing activity could be accurately measured.

SNG Barratt faced URL tracking issues alongside multiple indexing problems, where core pages were not being indexed and therefore not appearing in search engine results.

With the acquisition of all businesses under one group, targeting strategy required careful consideration. Multiple brands were competing for similar enthusiast audiences, making it essential to prevent internal competition that could drive up average CPCs and reduce overall campaign efficiency.

The client sought to drive consistent year-over-year revenue growth while protecting each business unit from internal competition, bringing greater stability to Return on Ad Spend, and securing a commanding presence across international search engine results pages (SERPs).

Data & Discovery

Every project begins with thorough market research, competitor analysis and a full tech stack audit. From the outset, we integrate AI across our strategy, from researching and optimising for AI overviews to leveraging AI functionality within our middleware feed software to maximise visibility across Google Shopping and Meta Ads.

A core focus of the research phase is identifying opportunities to capture market share from competitors. This approach proved highly effective in our initial SEO strategy project with Rimmer Bros, where we successfully drew significant market share from Moss Europe prior to the acquisition of both businesses to form the MPG Group.

Strategy

The strategy was built on the principle that SEO, PPC, Meta Ads and Email must operate as one cohesive unit to maximise eCommerce revenue. SEO efforts were concentrated on owning positions 1 and 2 for overlapping marques and models across the businesses, while PPC required careful planning to avoid driving up Average CPCs in shared product categories. Email campaigns were shaped by insights drawn from both PPC and SEO, from surfacing top-performing products to extending the reach of blog content. The result is a tightly aligned, multi-channel strategy that has delivered consistent, scalable performance growth.

Execution - SEO

A central pillar of the SEO execution strategy was ensuring that every page across all of the websites was thoroughly optimised to capture demand at each level of the classic car parts purchasing funnel, from high-level marque searches through to highly specific component and part queries.

Given the breadth of their catalogues, spanning marques including Triumph, MG, Rover, Land Rover, Range Rover, Jaguar, and Mazda MX5, comprehensive keyword research was conducted across three distinct tiers. The first tier focused on marque-level pages, targeting broad but high-intent searches such as “Triumph car parts” or “Jaguar classic parts.” The second tier addressed model-level specificity, targeting searches tied to individual vehicles within each marque, for example “Triumph TR6 parts” or “Land Rover Series 3 parts.” The third tier targeted individual components and assemblies, capturing the high purchase-intent, long-tail queries where classic car owners are searching for a specific part for a known vehicle.

This tiered approach reflects how classic car enthusiasts and restorers actually search. Unlike the modern car parts market, buyers in this space often have a deep knowledge of their vehicle and will search with considerable specificity, making granular, model-level optimisation particularly impactful.

Beyond primary keyword targeting, semantic SEO principles were applied throughout. This involved identifying and addressing the broader questions and related search intent surrounding each page, for example fitment compatibility queries (“Will this fit a 1974 Triumph Spitfire?”), guidance on OEM versus pattern parts, restoration-specific considerations, and technical specification questions. By incorporating these semantic signals into on-page content, the strategy aimed to strengthen topical authority across each marque and model, while also improving eligibility for featured snippets and People Also Ask placements in the SERPs.

This research-led, granular approach to on-page optimisation ensured that pages were not only competitive for high-volume head terms, but also well-positioned across the extensive long-tail search landscape where classic car restorer intent is at its highest.

Execution - PPC

A significant component of the paid search execution involved building out and managing Google Shopping across all four MPG Group businesses: Rimmer Bros, SNG Barratt, Moss Europe, and Moss Motors. Each business operates within the classic British car parts market but serves distinct primary audiences and geographic territories, requiring a tailored approach to both feed management and campaign architecture.

The foundation of the Shopping activity was ensuring that product feeds were comprehensively built out and optimised for each business. This included accurate and detailed product titles incorporating marque, model, and part-level information, ensuring that listings appeared for the most relevant search queries at each level of specificity. Feed health was monitored and maintained on an ongoing basis, with particular attention paid to product categorisation, condition attributes, and image quality, all of which directly influence Shopping eligibility and performance.

Given the international footprint of the group, a core area of execution was ensuring that feeds were correctly configured for each target territory. Rimmer Bros and SNG Barratt serve a predominantly UK and European audience, with Moss Europe extending this reach further across the continent, while Moss Motors operates as the dedicated US-facing entity selling in USD. Feeds were structured to reflect the correct currency, pricing, and shipping configurations for each locale, with delivery cost settings accurately mapped per region to ensure Shopping listings were both compliant and competitive. Incorrect or missing shipping data in Merchant Center is a common cause of feed disapprovals and suppressed impressions, so particular care was taken to validate these settings across all accounts.

With feeds in good health across the group, the focus then turned to campaign structure and budget allocation. A consistent challenge across the MPG businesses is the significant overlap in marques and models covered. Triumph, MG, Jaguar, and Land Rover parts, for example, are stocked and sold across multiple businesses within the group, meaning that without careful structuring, the accounts risked competing against one another in auction and inflating average CPCs unnecessarily.

To address this, a priority-led targeting approach was developed for each business. Rather than each account bidding indiscriminately across all overlapping inventory, campaigns were structured around the areas of greatest commercial strength and strategic importance for each brand. SNG Barratt’s specialism in Jaguar parts, for instance, informed the priority targeting focus for that account, while Rimmer Bros’ broader catalogue across Triumph, Rover, and Land Rover was reflected in its campaign hierarchy. Moss Motors, as the US market entity, was managed with geo-targeting parameters that ensured it was not cannibalising traffic from the UK and European-facing businesses.

Bid strategies and budget weightings were set according to each business’s commercial priorities and margin considerations, with the overarching goal of maximising collective Shopping visibility for the MPG Group while keeping inter-group auction competition to a minimum and maintaining efficient CPCs across the portfolio.

Innovation and Creativity

With no off-the-shelf solutions available within Rimmer Bros’ bespoke platform, we created custom blog and category page frameworks tailored specifically to the site’s architecture. This investment in purpose-built infrastructure directly supported our SEO strategy, driving first-page dominance for competitive, high-volume terms and earning placements within AI overviews.

Each of the businesses in the MPG Group are all on varying bespoke website platforms, which made it trickier when getting SEO content uploaded to the website, having to closely liaise with internal teams to get this uploaded to the website as part of the ongoing SEO strategy.

The project involved working across two bespoke platforms (RB and SNG) and one niche platform (Moss by Sana), each presenting its own set of constraints. Despite the inherent limitations of these non-standard environments, our team successfully implemented a consistent SEO content framework across all three, adapting our approach to suit each platform’s unique architecture without compromising on strategic output.

In parallel, early-stage auditing uncovered conversion tracking discrepancies on both RB and SNG. Given the bespoke nature of these platforms, resolving these issues required in-depth technical investigation, moving beyond standard diagnostic processes to identify and address root causes that were unique to each environment.

A key challenge within the email marketing strategy was the absence of any native integration between the website and email platform, with the two systems operating entirely independently of one another.

eComOne’s relationship with the MPG Group began with Rimmer Bros, initially focusing on SEO strategy. As Radial Equity Partners continued to acquire and expand the group, the scope of that partnership grew in step, with additional services and businesses brought under eComOne’s remit over time.

The decision to consolidate all digital activity under a single agency was a deliberate strategic move. With multiple businesses operating in the same market and often selling the same or similar products, a unified approach was essential. Having one agency oversee all digital channels meant that strategies could be aligned across every project and brand, reducing the risk of the businesses competing against one another in search rankings or driving up cost-per-click unnecessarily across paid advertising campaigns.

This joined-up approach sits at the heart of the MPG Group’s broader digital strategy, ensuring that growth across one brand supports rather than undermines the performance of the others.

Chris Wrigley, Managing Director

Navigating the minefield of do’s and don’ts in digital marketing for a global group is certainly a challenge, one that requires specialist attention and strategy to mitigate any risk of group siblings competing against each other, or unnecessarily driving advertising costs up. eComOne listened to our needs, understood our business and provided a bespoke strategy that supported our objectives and collaborated with existing partners. Implementation and reporting is excellent, with their team delivering experienced advice with clear direction for the group to make a decision as markets or priorities evolve.

Alexandra Stephens, Head of Performance

Working with MPG Group across their entire digital strategy has been a fantastic partnership. By bringing together specialists in technical SEO, paid advertising, and feed management, we have helped them establish a dominant presence in the classic car automotive market.

In April 2024, Radial Equity Partners acquired and merged two of the classic car parts industry’s most respected names, Moss Motors (including Moss Europe) and Rimmer Bros, bringing them together under a unified group structure.

As part of a strategic consolidation, Moss Europe and Rimmer Bros are set to merge into a single entity, MossRimmer, in 2026. Moss Motors and SNG Barratt will continue to operate as standalone brands within the wider MPG Group, preserving their individual heritage and customer relationships while benefiting from shared resources.

The creation of MossRimmer represents more than a rebrand. It is a deliberate effort to strengthen operations from the ground up. Stock levels are being scaled, parts availability is expanding, and the supply chain is being rebuilt with long-term resilience in mind. The goal is clear: to better support classic car ownership well into the future.

Throughout this period of significant change, eComOne will remain as a constant partner to MossRimmer and the broader MPG Group. Providing ongoing digital support, eComOne is playing a central role in the group’s continued eCommerce growth journey, helping to ensure that operational transformation is matched by a strong and scalable online presence.

This transition marks a defining chapter for the MPG Group, with the decisions made now set to shape the trajectory of the business for years to come.

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