About ModCloth:
ModCloth is an online vintage apparel and accessories retailer with global presence. The company has been using Search Engine Marketing for quite a long time, the management of the campaigns was done manually by the internal team of the company.
ModCloth’s Objective:
The company was in the phase of hyper growth so it became very important for them to ensure that along with the primary business sustenance strategies, marketing strategies too should be redefined.The company wanted to widen its presence through advertising in countries like Australia and United Kingdoms and along with it also wanted to increase its revenue from existing market.
Strategy Adopted By Modcloth:
Modcloth used paid engine marketing with around 1,50,000 keywords but the company wanted to improve the profitability and brand equity through the SEM as a medium and the company was smart enough to realize that day to day keyword management and optimisation cannot be handled manually.
So company went ahead with the idea of hiring a paid search vendor who would help them with automated bidding , would track day to day performance of keywords and provide robust reports.
Once the new software was installed to the website, Modcloth along with the vendor started adding keywords and focused on long tail keywords and modifiers .This helped it to cut down unwanted traffic. The number of keywords increased to 7,00,000 as they were targeting to get non branded traffic too along with the branded one and also they sorted different keywords for all the products that they were selling.
With the software generating all kinds of useful reports, Modcloth implemented optimisation as a continuous process. For example- testing different landing pages with different keywords etc. The company went ahead with implementing AUTOMATED BIDDING which enabled it to bid for the most relevant keywords and to add the new ones which could help them to attract the real customers.
Results:
Within two years of adopting software driven automated marketing strategy the following changes were reflected:
>Paidsearch revenue increased by 22%
>Managed keywords increased by 500%
>Reduction in cost per click by 14%
>Reduction in time spent on reporting and biding by 30%
Learnings:
>SEM is a continouos process, optimisation is the key to success of SEM.
>SEM strategy should be in tune with the business objective of the organisation in order to get the best desired results.
>Organisations should be open to adopting new technology (automated bidding) which helps them in channelising the energy and time in the most optimum way.
