A SearchForce Case Study New technology gives leading marketing information provider dramatic ROI improvement on SEM campaigns
BACKGROUND EXPERIAN QAS Location Boston, MA Industry Business Services Web Site http://www.qas.com/ As one of the three major credit bureaus, Experian provides a wide range of information and analytics to help guide business decisions. The company s QAS division is a leading provider of address data quality software and services offering a suite of products to capture, validate, cleanse, standardize and enrich addresses, names and other important contact information. THE CHALLENGE The lack of a sophisticated third-party SEM management tool posed several fundamental challenges in improving performance and making search an effective lead generation and conversion tool. These challenges included: Too much management complexity. The marketing team spent many hours per week managing keyword portfolios and ad budgets. Lack of centralized reporting and analytics. With different reports generated in multiple applications, it was difficult to assemble rolled up summary reports that could provide a quick access to a comprehensive and up-to-date view of performance. Little control over optimization. Because Experian relied on an agency, the company could not easily change optimization parameters and could not take advantage of more advanced capabilities, such as multi-publisher accounts, portfolio management and multi-metric optimization. Without access to advanced search marketing technology, the company s search campaign suffered from low keyword quality scores. These low scores resulted in substandard click-through and conversion rates, plus high a cost per acquisition compared to industry averages THE SOLUTION Adopting integrated high-performance SEM technologies The Experian QAS team selected SearchForce to provide both the technology and expertise to achieve several critical goals Manage all accounts through one single reliable platform with a proven track record
Restructure the company s accounts to boost quality scores and click-through rates, while lowering cost-per-acquisition Create new accounts and thematic ad groups, while expanding keyword lists without adding management complexity Deliver more revenue at an equal or lower cost Conversion rates rose to more than 10% THE RESULTS A signifcant improvement in ROI Once the SearchForce technology was deployed, Experian QAS marketing executives began to see dramatic campaign result improvements in just a few weeks. These key results included Lower cost-per-acquisition This chart above shows an impressive increase in the number of clicks in the initial five months following the switch to SearchForce, with a reduction in the total cost-per-acquisition (CPA). Clicks increased by approximately 7,000 per month while CPA fell by 30%, resulting in a savings of $7.68 per acquisition. Higher conversion rates up 41% In the first six months since deploying SearchForce, the campaign s conversion rate rose from 7.16% to more than 10% a 41% improvement. With these improvements came more conversions. Over the period, the company got 2,500 more conversions with no increase in ad spending.
Superior positioning through higher quality scores Thanks to quality scores that rose by 19%, Experian QAS ads were displayed in a higher position This chart shows that in just one month, average quality scores rose from 3.7 to 4.4, giving the company s ads a higher position rising from an average of 3.3 to 1.4 NEXT STEPS Further optimization improvements Although Experian exceeded all of its initial goals, the company plans to continue to make improvements to lower costs, streamline workflow, and improve lead generation metrics. Future plans call for a custom-weighted attribution model. This SearchForce product provides customized optimization on two or more separate metrics. This will allow the company to analyze multiple conversion types so that optimization can be customized for individual sets of keywords based on the role they play in generating interest, action, and conversion. These results were certainly impressive, but what s even more impressive is how quickly campaign performance improved. With the right technology in place, Experian QAS saw significant improvements in several campaign metrics in just a few days. As Experian QAS Sebastien Gelas, Senior Web Specialist pointed out, Bringing our PPC management in-house turned out to be an excellent move and SearchForce is the perfect solution for meeting our needs today and to support improving our performance well into the future.
ABOUT the rithm of ROI In 2004, a team of bright, seasoned technology experts had a bold idea a vision that created a transformational change in the way search engine marketers design and manage campaigns. The idea? Combine the power of financial modeling techniques to optimize and synchronize search engine bidding automatically across all search engines on one convenient hosted online platform. Every day, SearchForce continues to set the standard for how advertisers and agencies manage complex campaigns and track performance across all online advertising channels. More tools, more features, more benefits No matter the goal building traffic, gathering more leads, or increasing conversions SearchForce delivers powerful tools that can boost ROI, while saving hours of valuable time. Automated bid management and optimization. Informative reporting and analytics. streamlined campaign management, and cross-channel conversion tracking. By integrating a set of smart algorithms and features on a convenient web-hosted platform, SearchForce is the solution of choice for advertisers such as Progressive, Scottrade, and agencies like Plattform Advertising. Best of all? No steep learning curve. No high cost. No complexity. Contact us for more information on how we can help you find your rithm of ROI. www.searchforce.com (650) 235.8777 sales@searchforce.com