More Search Engine Marketing

Huge Holiday Success Due to Long Time Commitment to Eliminating Counterfeits

IMPAQT Case Study: Retail

Share |

A top luxury jewelry retailer with a recognizable brand noticed that they were battling counterfeit companies for a top position within the Search Engines. When searching for their branded keywords, a sea of imposters would clutter the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) and the searcher would struggle to decipher which ad was the real brand.

This issue was detrimentally affecting the client’s Paid campaign by driving abnormally high CPCs for what should have been low cost branded terms. They were allocating such a large amount of budget toward maintaining a competitive edge with their branded terms that they were unable to advance in other areas of search, particularly during the holiday seasons. The luxury retailer sought IMPAQT’s help to battle these counterfeits, decrease CPCs and increase online revenue through the holiday seasons.

QUESTION:

How could IMPAQT help this client battle counterfeiters in the online space to decrease CPCs and allocate more spend to other areas of search?

REVELATION:

Part 1: Combating Counterfeiters

First, our team reached out to the Search Engines to identify the best way to resolve this issue. They explained that we would need to file a formal complaint – at which point they would enforce their legal rules with the offenders. We knew that since the engines deal with enormous amounts of complaints on a daily basis, we would need to take a very proactive approach in order to stay top of mind and get this issue permanently resolved. We did a sweep of the client’s branded terms on the engines and methodically sent formal complaints to the engines every day.

After more than a year of sending these complaints to the engines on a daily basis, we saw a major decline in the presence of counterfeiters within Search results for the client’s branded terms. Although only a few imposters get through to the Search results pages today, our team still sweeps the space frequently, and we now rarely need to file a complaint.

Part 2: New Budget and Strategies for the Holiday Season

After addressing the counterfeit issue, competition on the client’s branded terms significantly decreased, and so did CPCs. We were then able to scale the client’s budget appropriately and our team could create a very smart and efficient way to grow the client’s campaign over the upcoming holiday season. A few strategies were taken due to this newly available budget:

Every year the team plans around a forecasted “best day,” which is typically the Monday before Christmas week. This year, that day did exceptionally well, but the team noticed that success was being sustained for a longer period of time. Because we worked hard to decrease CPCs and increase budget, we had the resources to fund at a higher level across that week to sustain the momentum brought on by consumers.
Our team was also able to spend much more on non-branded terms this year, because they could spend less on branded terms. Going after new non-branded keywords and spending more on those keywords helped the client capture more consumers at earlier stages of the buying cycle during and even before the holiday season.

The IMPAQT:

As mentioned earlier, CPCs fell drastically after IMPAQT significantly decreased counterfeiters for the client’s branded search terms. The extra budget that was available as a result of this effort allowed the client to grow its PPC presence at a key seasonal time when returns are high.

During this holiday season, the retailer saw the best December revenue in five years. The client saw the following successes in comparison to the previous year’s holiday season: