Measuring dollars, not just visits

Having no history of metrics or simply running a campaign and not being able to understand results tight to revenue(ROI), specifically dollars, is like trying to reach a destination without a map. One of the first initiative I implemented while employed at MorrellWine.com was the addition Google Analytics to track all user activity. They had a a fairly outdated tracking system called WebSite Story, that only track visits without any insight into actual dollars.

Google Analytics helped us find direction as to how were going to use the online’s department marketing budget. After gathering data for 3 months, we started exploring multiple marketing segments such as SEO, PPC, Product Feeds. We also started measuring the response of our email marketing blasts and which email offers generated a higher customer response.

Services

SEO, PPC, Products Feed, Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, UX and UI Development

Tools Used

LinkShare, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Photoshop, Illustrator, PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, IContact

SEO

Through a dynamic formula we were able to query our product data structure and pull out human language categories for the search engine robots to grab. Soon enough our categories of products were being pulled into Google and other search engines top rankings steadily increasing the average monthly visits by 10% consistently.

Also, since Morrell Wine has it’s main clientele residing in New York City, we wanted to target New Yorkers searching for the top wine store next door. We set up our meta and title tags to target local New Yorkers looking for a wine store. The result was an immediate 15% increase in online searchers landing in our site not only from the NY geographic area, but also prospects looking to ship wine to New York from all over the USA and abroad.

PPC

Though Google and Yahoo PPC would generate a substantial amount of qualified leads, we soon found out that it was more cost effective to channel our marketing budget to higher ROI activities. After creating customized landing pages and 3 months of analysis we decided to suspend our PPC campaigns in Google and Yahoo and invest our budget to product feeds instead.

Products Feed (Google Shopping, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Snooth, Wineaccess.com, WineSearcher.com)

We made the decision to focus on product centric portals such as WineSearcher.com, WineAccess.com, and Snooth.com. We also fed our products to generic product portals such as Shopping.com. We found a much higher ROI on product feeds campaigns specially in the wine product centric engines. We also use a formula similar to the one we use in our SEO to pull keywords separated by commas to enhance the Google Shopping ranking. As a result, our traffic and orders attributed to Google Shopping increased 18%.

Affiliate Marketing

Our affiliate program had multiple problems when I came into the company. Multiple issues needed to be addressed:

  • Clean up: Progressive Anti-Parasite stance and the removal of all affiliates that had been participating in any parasitic activities involving bidding our using our company/brand name.
  • Coupon Campaigns: Coupon creation and distribution through the affiliate channel.
  • Creative Inventory: Implementation of a new set of creatives for use by affiliates
  • Development of the use of Video for affiliate marketing.

Analytics help us identify and record any abuses within out affiliate program from both parasites and trademark bidders. When we culled the parasites and trademark bidders from the program, the result was a massive 65% drop in revenue from the previous month. We had to work closely with affiliate partners to ensure that only ‘clean sales’ were generated. The end result by December 2007 was a year on year sales increase of over 20%.