Efficient Frontier Insights

New Case Study: Countrywide

UK client Countrywide started working with Efficient Frontier in 2010, to enhance the online proposition for a number of its brands, focusing mainly on Propertywide. Efficient Frontier’s brief was to manage and improve ROI from Propertywide’s multiple pay per click campaigns; and to improve account efficiency while increasing the volume of conversions.

Read the full case study here to see how Propertywide reduced cost per click by 55 percent and increased leads by 115 percent, all of which was achieved without changing the search budget. 

Merinda Peppard - Global Marketing Manager

SMX München 2011

SMX (Search Marketing Expo) took place in Munich last week, this time in the Hilton Hotel Munich near Englischer Garten. Niels Jensen, Efficient Frontier’s own Account Director for Germany presented alongside Phillip Arnold from TUI Interactive on the panel "Search & Beyond". TUI is one of the largest travel brands in Europe with more than 10,000 hotels in its portfolio. The topic of the presentation was "The Adwords Strategy at TUI" and both presented insights and best practices from TUI Interactive’s Hotel Names Campaign. Efficient Frontier’s objective was to build up a search campaign for hotel names only, which are part of TUI’s hotel portfolio, without being over-reliant on TUI’s brand. 

Niels and Phillip discussed how the set up of the long tail was constructed and how the bid management for nearly 100,000 keywords was put into place. In addition, they discussed an A/B landing page test set up and how the dynamic ad copy was handled by Efficient Frontier. A key strategic decision by TUI Interactive was to replace the hotel pages of “Traveltainment” they used previously, with their own landing pages, in order to get better information to users.

Later in the presentation Niels and Phillip uncovered the results of the campaign. The overall Quality Score was increased to factor 7 and the key figures for the click through rate, conversions and return on marketing investment were increased substantially. On the whole, TUI Interactive is excited about the results they achieved with Efficient Frontier. Both Niels and Phillip were mobbed by the 80 strong audience after the presentation with many interesting questions which tells us that the topic was greatly received.

Image Search Ads – A Case Study with The Carphone Warehouse

Google unveiled Image Search Ads in July 2010 but this space is still under-utilized. Many queries that are oversubscribed on Search have one or no ads above the same keyword on Image Search. Although there is less volume in this channel than traditional search, part of the reason is scalability because the process of adding and editing these ads is still very manual. Implementation is only possible within Adwords (there is no support for API or Adwords Editor) and you have to upload ads one at a time using the display ad builder.

For marketing managers running massive campaigns at scale (or those running smaller campaigns with no time to spare) Image Search Ads can be easily ignored for those reasons.

However, after a recent test with one of the UK’s largest retailers, The Carphone Warehouse, it is clear that Image Search Ads can be a great way to add incremental revenue to an already well developed marketing campaign.

We started with an initial test of 8 high volume handsets. We duplicated the keywords from our ‘Generic’ Adgroups, while taking the messaging from the best performing ad copy for each handset. For Images we used ones already in use on the Client’s Website. This approach allowed us to implement these ads very quickly to compensate for the time it takes to manually upload Image Search ads.

As you can see below, over a 30 day period Image Search ads accounted for 11.69% of clicks, 6.92% of Impressions and only cost 1.7% of the budget.

 
This showed us that CTR was higher, and CPCs were much smaller than Search. Furthermore, despite a relatively small level of Impressions, the high CTR combined with low cost makes this channel an extremely effective source of additional traffic.

These figures make it immediately apparent that this is a massively under-utilized channel which should be explored further.  Additionally, from a Branding perspective this is an alluringly cost-effective way to extend your reach. However, these impressions and clicks may be just people browsing with no intention of even purchasing. The question on ROI-driven Clients minds will be: “how does it convert?”

 
Unfortunately our doubts were justified: Conversion Rates are 68% lower than on Search. This is because, as we expected, a customer searching for Images of Phones is further up the Purchase Funnel (i.e. they are still researching the product) and therefore are less likely to convert.

However, you can see that the other core metrics are far better than on Search. If we combine these competing effects together, we can see that the cheaper CPCs and higher CTRs more than compensate for the lower Conversion Rate. The real indication of success is that despite the lower commercial intent of the Image Search audience, The Carphone Warehouse pays 59% less for each sale generated by Image Search Ads!

We are now planning to roll these ads out across all of the hundreds of handsets The Carphone Warehouse sells because we simply can’t afford to wait for Google to make it easier for us.

These additional sales are likely to be a small piece of the overall pie and it is a pain to manually upload these ads one-by-one, but it may be worth trying given the increased sales lift.  

Gareth Jones, Head of Online,The Carphone Warehouse:

“This is a great example of the incremental revenue available in other channels – we work with Efficient Frontier to test all new opportunities on Google (and elsewhere) to make sure our scope is as wide as possible.”

Michael Taylor,
UK Associate Account Manager

Follow the data...not the position

When we take onboard new clients, we find that some clients have a predetermined idea on which position on the Search Engine is the best. Some advertisers believe position 1-3 on Google is a must. Putting aside any branding or defensive PR reason for being placed at number one, one of the first things we try to educate new clients is to let the data dictate your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) position.  The following case study shows the importance of letting the data work its magic and give you a better ROI.
 
Recently, a German travel client used more than 3900 keyword constraints in order to influence its overall performance. A keyword constraint is the maximum/minimum CPC or maximum/minimum position rule for each individual keywords.  Soon, 90% of the daily budget was used to fulfill these constraint targets and only 10% of the budget was actually used to optimize keywords and increase real performance.
 

By taking away the majority of constraints, the complete daily budget was available to have the keyword market develop and to use the data generated from Efficient Frontier's portfolio optimization technology. Monitoring the performance very intensely, the following development was encountered.

When looking at Efficient Frontier's simulations this step became even more obvious. When the constraints were taken away, uplifts can be expected immediately. In this case, we saw an ROI increase of 96% (day to day) and 45% (week to week) just by taking away keyword limitations and letting the invisible hand of the optimizer take over. Since then, the free market environment has allowed the performance to improve continuously.

So if ROI is your key objective,  resist the need to seek the top SERPs positions and liberate your keywords from their constraints to improve performance and ROI.

Julian Stank
SMS Hamburg Germany

Motley Fool UK Case Study at SMX London

Last Friday Jonathan Beeston, our UK Director of Client Services, presented a financial services case study at SMX London. Fool.co.uk started optimizing (or optimising, as they write in the UK) their search campaigns using Efficient Frontier's bid management technology in April 2007, and within two weeks experienced a significant increase in volume and decrease in CPA. After just one month volume had increased by 83% and CPA had dropped by 43%.

We didn't stop with just bid optimization for Fool.co.uk - we also helped expand their keyword list into the long tail, restructured the campaign, and expanded the campaign from just credit cards to loans, mortgages, insurance, and banking. We also refined ad copy, conducted keyword testing, landing page optimization, and match type expansion, and made use of our simulations and forecasting. 

Fool.co.uk is one of the leading finance sites in the UK, with over 2 million members and 600,000 monthly visitors. Their search marketing efforts are helping to increase value for partners and grow the site even more. The past six months of algorithmic campaign optimization combined with smart search marketing practices have resulted in an overall drop in CPA 86% and an increase in click-out value of 320%.

This example is what makes search engine marketing so interesting - it's not very hard for an advertisers to cost-effectively acquire new customers through search, but the additional investment in optimization can produce results that far exceed expectations.