Petco Automates Search Campaign Management with New Coremetrics Offering

Thousands of products and hundreds of keywords listed across multiple online marketing channels means one thing: manual campaign management is out of the question.

Burlingame, CA’s Web services and marketing analytics firm, Coremetrics, has introduced Marketing Management Center (MMC) in the hopes of alleviating the choice between manual cross-channel campaign optimization and nothing at all. Part of its Marketforce platform, MMC uses “auto-sensing” technology to measure the performance of banners, keywords, portal and affiliate placements, and emails.

At pet supply retailer Petco, lack of automation was a major obstacle to implementing a search engine optimization campaign. Comments Heather Blank, director of ecommerce marketing and business development at Petco, “We were looking at SEO for a long time, but one hurdle was how can we track it to the level we need to track?” The company had already been employing Coremetrics’s Marketforce software to track email campaigns when it agreed to beta test the new MMC product.

“Marketers have dozens and dozens of choices: banner ads, paid search, affiliate links, product placements, email....“ explains Chi-Hua Chien, director of marketing at Coremetrics. “Every single one of those vendors sends a spreadsheet that has metrics that cannot be benchmarked against one another.”

According to Blank, Petco has been using MMC for the past three weeks to automate tracking of “upwards of 8,500 campaigns” and compare them across all channels and vendors. Consider that manual implementation of something on this scale could take around five minutes per campaign, and it’s understandable that Petco deemed it impracticable before.

Following a fourth week of running the campaigns, the firm aims to determine which keywords are driving sales of particular products. In other words, what are consumers clicking on and what are they actually buying afterwards? Chances are, initial use of MMC will lead Petco to shift dollars from search keywords and placements that don’t generate significant revenue to ones that do.

By capturing and compiling all consumer behavioral data, which is stored in Coremetrics’s servers and owned by its clients, historical profiles of individual customers are developed to help assess their lifetime value and the performance of specific online placements (keyword buys on Yahoo vs. Google, for instance). Clients can query the MMC interface to analyze and sift out customer segments. For example, Coremetrics’s client Eddie Bauer could find out how many people have bought more than $1,000 worth of merchandise in the last 12 months and have viewed the khakis page twice in the past 60 days. Once that segment is isolated, a highly targeted email offer such as a discount on khakis could be sent to them.

In addition, product cost information can be embedded and encrypted into the Web source code of individual product pages to better assess return on investment.

Although the bulk of Coremetrics’s clients are direct-to-consumer ecommerce companies including Spiegel Catalog, Victoria’s Secret and The Columbia House Company, the three-year-old firm also serves b-to-b clients such as Motorola and Nortel Networks, and is looking to enter the travel services market soon.

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