• 50% Less time managing campaigns
  • Increased ROI by over 54%
  • Increased profit by 121%
  • Streamlined workflow managing millions of keywords
With millions of keywords, we are saving a ton of time using Marin. Our team spends half the time they used to on management activities and have been able re-allocate time to much more strategic activities—increasing volume and profit for our already high-volume business.”

Janet Tran,
Sr. Online Marketing Manager, PriceGrabber

PriceGrabber Doubles Profits for Large Scale Paid Search Programs

OVERVIEW

PriceGrabber.com is an online price comparison service. They are partnered with more than 13,000 merchants, retailers, and sellers and provide free and unbiased information on millions of products in 25 different categories including everything from personal to technology products. The company also serves as the data source for numerous shopping Web sites, including Bing, About.com, iVillage, Comcast and CNET.

CHALLENGE

With a continually growing list of millions of products, PriceGrabber’s paid search program spans more than 16 Million keywords in over 100 different search engine accounts. As the company continued to expand its offerings, the paid search team found themselves struggling to manage the sheer size and complexity of the program. PriceGrabber used an internally built system to track, manage, and optimize their online advertising program, however, the tools had become cumbersome and ineffective for managing at scale. The marketing team was especially challenged to calculate bids at the keyword level, often spending hours a day on calculations. Because of the size of the program, PriceGrabber also has a large number of keywords that don’t receive clicks. Given the scarcity of available data, the PriceGrabber team struggled to accurately predict bids for these “long tail” terms. Finally, the daily process of reviewing performance, identifying trends, and reporting was taking a significant portion of the team’s time, preventing them from engaging in more strategic tasks such as creative testing and campaign expansion.

SOLUTION

After a thorough review of the tools available on the market, including a head to head test between leading vendors, PriceGrabber selected Marin Software to help scale and optimize the comparison shopping service’s online advertising program. With Marin’s powerful and easy to use solution, the PriceGrabber team was able to automate the bidding process across their entire portfolio of keywords. PriceGrabber used Marin’s Folders to organize AdGroups with common margin goals as they vary by product line. For example they created a folder for electronics keywords and separating them from the “personal” folder because they have a different margin goals. Sharing data across similar keywords, Marin’s powerful bidding solution leverages Bayesian estimation, to optimize PriceGrabber’s long-tail keywords, taking the guesswork out of the bid adjustments that they were doing manually.

With all of their campaigns in Marin, PriceGrabber was also able to efficiently filter and organize the large keyword set, deleting and pausing millions of keywords at a time that were either poorly performing, duplicates, or out of date. In addition to helping PriceGrabber get rid of poorly performing keywords and campaigns, the ability to quickly filter by performance and make edits from a single screen in Marin made day-to-day campaign management a much less time consuming task. PriceGrabber has been able to take these time-savings and dedicate more time to strategic optimization such as creative testing, quality score management and campaign expansion.

RESULTS

Leveraging Marin Software has significantly streamlined PriceGrabber’s online advertising program, providing both time savings and increased profit. By automating keyword level bidding according to unique margin goals, Marin enabled the PriceGrabber team to increase revenue while spending up to 50% less time managing paid search. Due to the time savings Marin has delivered, PriceGrabber has continued to profitably expand their advertising program and has increased revenues over the past year.

Performance improvements from one of the advertiser’s largest categories after a year of using Marin include:

  • 121% increase in profit
  • 173% increase in margin
  • 20% decrease in cost per conversion
  • 18% increase in conversion rate

Marin’s automated creative testing has helped PriceGrabber identify the most profitable ad-copy and make adjustments that helped further improve conversion rates across campaigns. Integrated keyword expansion has also proven valuable for PriceGrabber and in one month they seamlessly added over 100,000 profitable keywords to a single account.