When online retailer Discount Party Supplies launched www.discountpartysupplies.com in the spring of 2010, they joined an extremely competitive marketplace.
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The online party supply category was saturated with a multitude of players, including a handful of industry leaders already equipped with 12-15 years’ experience. Complicating matters further, each company was selling similar products at a similar price with similar discounts, and all of them were offering free shipping promotions.
Differentiation would prove difficult, but Discount Party Supplies believed the key might lie in being seen by the right customers at the right time—that is, people actively shopping for party supplies online.
To help achieve their two primary goals of increasing impression share and clickthrough rate, Discount Party Supplies enlisted digital agency Rocket Clicksto manage their entire paid search program.
To be successful in meeting these objectives, Rocket Clicks knew they had to first increase Discount Party Supplies’ ad coverage, i.e., how often their ads would show up on the search engine when their keywords were searched by consumers.
“The immediate questions we needed to know were ‘How do we compare to other sites in terms of coverage? Where are we losing that coverage and how can we improve it?'” said Tom Wolf, paid search analyst at Rocket Clicks. “Once we knew that, the question became ‘How do we improve clickthrough rate and stand out more?'”
In October 2011, Rocket Clicks looked to digital marketing intelligence providerAdGooroo to help it gather data on the keywords, impression share, budgets, ad copy, landing pages and ad coverage of Discount Party Supplies and its competition.
Rocket Clicks first examined advertiser comparison reports that showed how Discount Party Supplies stacked up against its top competitors. Specifically, they used AdGooroo to determine which of Discount Party Supplies’ campaigns were losing the most coverage and which of their keywords were missing the most impressions. Armed with this knowledge, Rocket Clicks could then determine whether they needed to increase their bid, concentrate on improving quality score, or both.
“By using AdGooroo’s tools, we could narrow down where the problem areas were and then see what we needed to do to improve,” Wolf said. “Where other, larger companies can just pump more money into their campaigns, we have to be more strategic. AdGooroo has helped us—we’re able to increase impressions, for instance, by making adjustments and improvements that don’t always relate to money.”
To boost clickthrough rates, Rocket Clicks used AdGooroo’s tools to see Discount Party Supplies’ best-performing ads and ad copy as well as those of their top competitors. With this insight, Rocket Clicks was able to generate new ideas to help improve Discount Party Supplies’ campaigns.
“Much of improving quality score is improving clickthrough rates. AdGooroo gave us insights into what the competition was doing and their best CTR results. Studying those, we could apply the learning to our own campaigns and see strong results,” Wolf said.
Within four months, Discount Party Supplies increased its overall impression share by 10% and their overall clickthrough rate by more than half a percent. In addition, the retailer went from a 30% impression share in their brand campaign to a 90% impression share.