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Founded in 2004, eCards revolutionised online greetings card industry. Today, eCards’ customers send thousands of free e-greetings cards for all occasions. eCards’ customer base spans a wide demographic, and, as such, real estate on the eCards site represents a premium opportunity for many advertisers. eCards makes 100% of their revenue through paid advertising on the site.
Brief
Having pioneered their way to a leading position in the market, eCards was looking for a cutting edge paid search management technology to allow them to continue to grow their business. Sam Heaton, MD and founder, had overseen the development of the paid search programme to a portfolio of over 75,000 keywords representing upwards of £200,000 per year in spend.
As eCards and its search program grew in size, Heaton found it more and more difficult to cost-effectively and accurately manage the large-scale search marketing programme via three individual search engine platforms. Heaton came to Marin with objectives to increase profitability through a combination of reducing keyword costs and improving conversion rate – thus reducing customer acquisition costs.
“Our search marketing programme worked very well to drive traffic to our site, but the ROI of the programme fluctuated, mostly because accurate daily analysis of our SEM programme was too cumbersome using the simplistic spreadsheet-based tools at our disposal,” said Heaton. “We knew some of our keywords weren’t cost effective, but the process to identify these under-performing terms and take action was time consuming. We needed a sophisticated paid search management application that would enable us to perform keyword analysis and drastically reduce the time required to take action when keywords were not performing.”
Strategy/Execution
eCards chose Marin Software on the strength of its robust technology, cutting-edge features, and knowledgeable client services team. In particular, eCards appreciated Marin’s ROI-based, fully-automated bidding platform, campaign optimisation tools, keyword expansion tools, and easy-to-use analytics and reports.
With Marin, eCards is able to automatically manage bids at the keyword level, saving time and money. “Now that we have Marin, daily reports are automated, campaign analysis is rapid and 100% accurate, bidding is automated and ROI focused – and automatically adjusts to changes in the market. There is no longer any risk of human error,” says Heaton.
Today, eCards relies on Marin’s automated daily reports to get an instant view of which keywords and groups are working to deliver traffic within ROI goals, and which ones are not. From here, the team can use the Marin Search Marketer user interface to rapidly drill down to areas where spending patterns are volatile and make the necessary edits to ensure the program is consistently meeting ROI goals.
Using Marin Search Marketer, Heaton estimates a 60% reduction in time taken to run their paid search programme compared to the previous manual method. Heaton spends an hour or two a day using Marin Search Marketer, and especially appreciates the sophisticated bid management and campaign optimisation features.
To continue to evolve their paid search programme, eCards regularly uses Marin for keyword expansion – driving additional traffic from long-tail terms. “We drove 70% of our traffic from a select group of high-volume keywords, but getting the remaining 30% of traffic was very difficult” added Heaton. “Marin’s keyword expansion tool allowed us to identify 15,000 new, relevant keywords in just two days”.
Results
eCards quickly achieved impressive results using Marin Search Marketer.
These included:
- Reduced overall SEM costs by 25% while at the same time improving programme performance
- Increased overall conversion by 4% and decreased cost-per-conversion by 11%
- Automatically optimised campaigns to eliminate under-performing keywords
- Identified and added thousands of new terms with keyword expansion tool
- Automated daily reporting for a high-level view of campaign and program-level ROI
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