L-com Global Connectivity: PPC for B2B E-Commerce
While the details are sometimes sensitive, the picture painted in the following client success stories is one of quantifiable results.
KoMarketing helps L-com Global Connectivity realize 66% increase for return on advertising spend.
The Challenge
L-com Global Connectivity designs and manufactures a wide range of interconnect products for the electronics and data communication industries.
Despite a significant advertising investment across major search engines, L-com was seeing an anemic return on ad spend of 1$. In other words, for every dollar they spent on advertisements they generated only a single dollar in revenue.
KoMarketing took over L-com’s search engine marketing accounts in May 2010 and was tasked with growing the return on advertising spend (RoAS) to a ratio of 2:1 (or more) within the first 180 days.
L-com markets to business and repeat buyers; they define a high value customer as an individual who makes an initial purchase of at least $110 and returns for a subsequent purchase within a six-month timeframe. As such, KoMarketing knew the focus needed to be on improving the lifetime value of these return customers.
Program components included PPC focused in marketing measurement, B2B E-commerce and international markets.
Program Implementation
Rebuild the PPC accounts; eliminate automatic ad placements
For myriad reasons, including but not limited to keyword selection, ad creative, and landing page decisions, in addition to a subpar clickthrough rate, which potentially gave the account a long-lasting penalty to quality score and position, KoMarketing decided L-com’s existing search engine marketing accounts couldn’t be used.
Instead, we recommended a “start fresh” and create new accounts for AdWords & Bing. This included creating smaller and more focused ad groups that focused on specific product types; experimenting with both highly technical and call-to-action-driven ad creative; and trying to find the “sweet spot” for ROI in multiple bid positions.
L-com was also spending thousands per month on the Display network but was seeing minimal return on investment. KoMarketing recommended eliminating the use of all automatic placements and then selected a very small list of industry specific sites where we believed that L-com would potentially reach its target customer.
In doing so, we helped L-com shave 80% of the Display budget almost immediately without reduce the revenue from the program significantly.
Optimizing the e-commerce platform
L-com had thousands of product SKUs and highly educated users who knew exactly which products they were looking for. Instead of bidding for broad based keywords (that tended to attract consumers), KoMarketing decided to incorporate the use of long tail keywords (i.e., detailed and specific keywords that would often include the product ID or Manufacturer ID in the keyword). For instance: “audio video connector” was replaced with “SVHS Mini Din 4 Connector.”
According to L-com, the e-commerce platform had a confusing navigation structure, so KoMarketing refrained from using the category (or the homepage) as a landing destination whenever possible. Instead, we linked searchers directly to relevant products to reduce bounce rate and to increase the chance that they would get to checkout.
Revising pay-per-click tactics
To maximize visibility in SERPs, KoMarketing utilized Sitelinks, the Google Plus extension, and the merchant center. By utilizing social extensions, L-com could take up more “space” on the Google front page – meaning it would be easier for customers to see ads and people would need to scroll farther down to see competitors. In other words, we were essentially creating many different touch points, including the main site, the right pane, Google shopping, etc.
To make sure the KoMarketing team was always in front of new product releases and inventory, we received weekly reports about which new product SKUs were being entered into the L-com site and then actively added them into new campaigns.
Results
Throughout the life of the account (2010 – present), L-com has seen dramatic improvement in RoAS, both in terms of percentage and dollar value. For the period of Q3 2011 – Q3 2013 specifically, RoAs climbed from 300+% to 400 – 500+%.
Based on the results, KoMarketing exceeded the client’s expectations for RoAS and as such, L-com continues to rely on us for its e-commerce and pay-per-click initiatives.
“I worked with KoMarketing during my time at Pongo in a variety of roles. At first, they were doing the work for us, but in the end, they trained my growing team on Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Their education of the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) led to us launching a job search blog, over 30 learning center articles, and a social media campaign. I would not hesitate to recommend the KoMarketing team for any size project you may have.”
