Ace Mart reduces online marketing spend by 25 percent to improve ROI

Challenge
Ace Mart allocates a monthly budget to online marketing campaigns—including paid search, paid inclusion, affiliate and online text banners—to drive website traffic and increase online sales. This specialty retailer wanted to maximize the ROI from their online marketing spend, but the conflicting metrics and tools available in the industry gave them absolutely no idea how their campaigns were performing relative to each other. Further, the analysis they received from their marketing partners showed click through rates but not the resulting sales.

Solution
Ace Mart implemented IBM® Coremetrics® Marketing Management Center (MMC), a feature of IBM® Digital Analytics, to track and analyze the ROI from every online marketing campaign in a single interface. At a glance, they were able to identify under-performing campaigns based on actual revenue numbers. Today, Ace Mart has successfully reduced their monthly marketing expenditures by 25 percent and increased ROI by eliminating keyword buys, cutting paid inclusion marketing spend and canceling online text banner advertising. “We were running several online marketing campaigns and all of them were driving traffic to our website. However, website traffic is not the right metric to gauge whether or not a marketing campaign is effective—you must look at the resulting sales. With IBM Coremetrics, our team can analyze the ROI of all our campaigns in a single interface. We were able to rapidly identify our under-performing campaigns and eliminate them from our budget. Because of IBM Coremetrics, we are saving 25% of our budget per month and we finally understand which campaigns drive sales. Our team can now re-direct those savings into our top performers and increase our revenue,” states Ace Mart’s Webmaster.

Eliminate 50 percent of paid keywords
The first change Ace Mart made was to eliminate low-performing keywords from their paid search campaigns. Out of 800 leading PPC provider keywords, they identified that over 50 percent of them were driving traffic to the website but not resulting in any actual sales. By eliminating over 50 percent of their keyword buys, they were able to reduce marketing keyword spend while attaining an increased ROI.

Cut paid inclusion marketing by 75 percent
The second change was to reduce their paid inclusion marketing spend by 75 percent. IBM Coremetrics quickly revealed that a paid inclusion marketing program through a leading provider was not delivering enough ROI to validate their current spend on particular inclusion advertisements. Ace Mart analyzed the ROI of each inclusion term via the IBM Coremetrics MMC.

Cancel all online text banner advertising
The third and final change was to eliminate their entire online banner advertising campaigns. Ace Mart was delivering an XML feed of their products to a marketing partner, who was building text banner advertisements based on those feeds for inclusion in major search provider results. However, Ace Mart soon realized that only .32 percent of the visitors from those advertisements were converting to a sale, so they eliminated the program altogether.

For more information To learn more about IBM Coremetrics please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/software/marketing-solutions