Rising Above, Not Just Surviving the Economic Storm

Last week, I attended the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Boston. It was a comprehensive event with multiple tracks to satisfy various objectives of an internet retailer. The theme of this year's event was "Rising Above, Not Just Surviving the Economic Storm", a fitting theme given consumer confidence is at an all time low and year over year growth rates are well below last year’s mark. 

Cross channel marketing was a common theme among many of the panels I attended. Investing in the technology to track, analyze and then optimize your marketing helped inform not just the marketing teams but the rest of the organization as well.  Understanding demand for products and ROI trends helped to understand inventory trends as well as how to best allocate a company’s marketing budget.

In the Web's Growing Importance panel the speakers discussed catalog resources and how budgets are quickly being shifted to the more efficient online efforts. The trend for retailers has been to weight more importance in the online knowledge of the business. Even in evaluating who should lead the marketing efforts, one speaker noted the trends he saw were leaning more towards a director of online marketing with 8 years of digital experience versus a VP of catalog marketing with 20 years of experience. I spoke on the panel, Tracking Keywords to determine ROI with Steven Broussard, the Marketing Director for Golfballs.com.

I shared with the audience some tips for setting up a search account and how to best track for optimal optimization.  Specific to the retail category, if a company sells products with different sales cycles and varying order sizes, it is best to have an account structure that allows the marketer to separate their data for better tracking. I also shared tips on how to use negatives to funnel traffic to the right campaign or ad group. Tracking everything discreetly is the first step in calculating your ROI. Tracking at the most granular level possible – the keyword level, match types, geo regions, etc - allows the advertiser to utilize the data to effectively optimize their SEM campaigns.

As retailers continue to weather the economic storm, it's imperative that marketers optimize their campaigns and track more effectively to achieve a greater ROI. The sooner this happens, Internet retailers will be poised for success during the recovery.

Bill Lan
Vice President, Global Account Director

Comments

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Great article. As more resources flow into a program,the more insights clients expect from their search agency. The days of one dimensional review and analysis are coming to a close.