Chemistdirect.co.uk Expands Ad Campaigns to PLAs, Mobile and Display through Marin Software

Online chemist saves 60% of time using Marin Software and drives incremental revenue through new online channels

London, 9 July 2013 – Marin Software (NYSE: MRIN), provider of a leading Revenue Acquisition Management platform for advertisers and agencies, today announced Chemistdirect.co.uk reduced the amount of time spent managing paid-search campaigns by 60% and boosted revenues from new online channels by leveraging the Marin platform.

Chemistdirect.co.uk is Europe’s leading online chemist, providing over 20,000 health and beauty products and prescription medicines online at the lowest price - with the highest pharmaceutical standards. Chemistdirect.co.uk wanted to scale their search campaigns quickly to significantly increase their share of the online chemist market. To grow their business they wanted to invest more in search, whilst maintaining a profitable Cost-of-Sale. However, they were concerned a saturation point had been reached where they couldn’t spend more without the Cost-of-Sale becoming unprofitable.

With over 20,000 health and beauty products and half-a-million keywords being managed by one person, the amount of time spent expanding and optimising their search campaigns was limited. The time drain of manually bidding and reporting across programs left little resource for strategic expansion into new areas such as the Google Display Network, Product Listing Ads and Mobile Search.

Chemistdirect.co.uk leveraged Marin’s automated bid algorithm and, due to the flexibility of the bid algorithm, they were able to bid towards their goal of increasing investment whilst maintaining a profitable Cost-of-Sale. As different products had different margins, Chemistdirect.com used Marin’s bidding folders to group together different products and keywords with the same margins, and then bid towards different goals.

Thanks to the efficiency of how search data is displayed in the Marin platform, the search manager saved a significant amount of time previously spent in spreadsheets. The ChemistDirect.co.uk team found they could easily filter data in the Marin interface to identify trends and quickly graph data to understand the impact their optimisation changes were having on any campaign.

With all the time saved through automated bidding and campaign management tools, Chemistdirect.co.uk were able to invest more time expanding their campaigns into new channels to drive incremental revenue. First, they expanded into Product Listing Ads (PLAs) and used Marin’s PLA tools to efficiently create and edit PLA campaigns, generate reports that deliver valuable insight into PLA performance, and optimise product target bids to maximise revenue. Chemistdirect.co.uk also had more time to focus on expanding their campaigns into mobile search and onto the Google Display Network, using Marin’s mobile and display functionality.

Chemistdirect.co.uk were able to save over 60% of time spent managing campaigns through their effective use of Marin Software. They were also able to execute additional work which would have required hiring three additional staff without Marin.

Marin’s automated bidding also enabled Chemistdirect.co.uk to spend 40% more whilst maintaining a profitable Cost of Sale. In addition, the time reinvested in expanding campaigns into new channels generated a 20% increase in volume of sales coming from the Google Display Network and also drove mobile to a position where it now accounts for a third of traffic to the Chemistdirect.co.uk site.

Richard Garrod, Marketing Director, Chemistdirect.co.uk, said: “What really sets Marin apart is their level of service. Our onboarding was handled in an incredibly smooth and professional manner, and was comfortably above what was expected. Both the online training and in-person training from our Client Services Manager enabled us to quickly learn the platform, and maximise its potential. The platform itself is so easy-to-use and enables us to manage the detail of our paid search campaign at scale. Also, it’s so simple to setup PLAs in the Marin interface, which makes a big difference to retailers like us who rely on this channel.”