• Implemented Dynamic Campaigns to publish specific ads for current offers
  • Doubled clickthrough rates
  • Reduced CPC by 30%
Lasoo provides upwards of 100,000 offers and by dynamically creating ads that represent our inventory, Marin has helped us drive higher value visitors through paid search and improved the quality of consumer’s experiences by linking them directly to the offers they’re interested in.”

Damien Donnelly,
Marketing Analyst, Lasoo

Lasoo Doubles Click-Through Rates With Dynamic Offers

Overview

Lasoo is Australia’s leading online shopping destination for consumers to research products and offers before buying. The company digitises retailers’ offers and catalogues to provide leads to online and brick and mortar stores through special offers and coupons. Lasoo’s retail partners pay for these leads based on the amount and value of consumer interaction with offers on the Lasoo site. Relying almost exclusively on organic and paid search, Lasoo generates nearly one million unique visitors to its site each month.

Challenge

The Lasoo website catalogues hundreds of thousands of products and offers that are continuously changing with retailers’ promotions. With previous marketing solutions, Lasoo was unable to effectively create and manage accurate search marketing campaigns to promote the nearly 100,000 unique offers that are deployed and expired weekly. Lasoo required a solution that could help them dynamically create paid search campaigns from the offer data supplied by retailers, and then run each campaign over a defined timeline from when a sale started, to when it ended. In order to make these campaigns successful, Lasoo needed to build ad copy that included offer specific data such as product and offer names, expiration dates, pricing and related terms. They also needed the ability to deep link paid search ads to relevant offer pages to encourage conversions. Retailers work with Lasoo and pay for “distributed engagement” that ultimately translates to in-store and online purchases. That is, they compensate Lasoo for a variety of conversion types that indicate engagement as a user moves down the conversion funnel. These engagement types include offer views, sharing products through social media platforms, as well as following Lasoo’s links to retailer’s websites and finding store locations. As the number of monetisable interactions on the Lasoo site grew, Lasoo required a way to effectively track multiple conversion events in order to optimise all facets of the site for engagement, to distribute this engagement to other platforms, and to be compensated for these interactions by their retail partners.

Solution

Lasoo decided to implement Marin Software to leverage the rich data that was provided with each offer from their retail partners. Lasoo chose Marin because they could easily import offer data directly into Marin Search Marketer and create the effective, offer specific ad campaigns they were missing. Another important factor in their decision was Marin Software’s ability to bid, monitor, and report effectively on the variety of conversion types that Lasoo needed to track. The usability of the tool to be able to manage such a large number of ad groups and keywords via bid rules, dimensions and folders was also a key consideration in choosing Marin. By providing Marin Software with structured feeds, Lasoo is now able to easily and automatically create and manage campaigns on Google and Yahoo. Marin’s Dynamic Campaigns solution generates relevant keywords from the product feed, utilising best-practices to avoid cost-sinks like broad matching on terms that are too generic. Marin optimises the resulting ad groups, targeting the long tail by automatically setting bids to meet Lasoo’s unique cost per visitor and cost per interaction goals. Below is an example of a Dynamic Campaign ad that includes Product Name, Price and Vendor:

Results

Marin Software has allowed Lasoo to profitably scale their paid search marketing program in ways that would have been impossible to do manually.

  • Click-through rates sky rocketed Dynamic Campaigns click-through rates are double that of generic campaigns and some have achieved click-through rates as much as 9 times higher.
  • The average CPC for campaigns dropped, CPC for some campaigns dropping over 30% Implementing Marin also directly created value for Lasoo’s retailers and online consumers.

Implementing Marin also directly created value for Lasoo’s retailers and online consumers. With Marin Search Marketer’s Dynamic Campaigns feature Lasoo has been able to publish search ads that represent the current offers that they are promoting across hundreds of thousands of items, targeting non-competitive terms. In addition to driving more traffic to the Lasoo website, this higher click through rate has helped increase their quality scores and decrease costs per click. Lasoo also leverages the analytics and alerting capabilities of Marin to further boost the effectiveness of their Dynamic Campaigns. When a Marin alert identifies a popular offer, the marketing team uses Marin’s keyword expansion tools to easily add new, related terms to campaigns; increasing qualified traffic and conversions. In addition to improving click-through-rates, incorporating product and offer specific information into creatives, has increased the quality of the user experiences for visitors to the site. By linking ads directly to offer landing pages that match the searcher intent, customers find what they are looking for quickly and are more likely to return. Since implementing the product feed, Lasoo has seen a steady rise in type in traffic as well as traffic to brand terms resulting from repeat users that have had a positive experience with the site.

December 2008 to January 2009 showed a seasonal drop of 173% of return visitors. After the product feed was active, this seasonal drop was cut to 43% showing that the Dynamic Campaigns helped drive return visits and loyalty. When the product feed was turned off in February for testing, Lasoo saw a direct correlation with return visitor growth stagnation.