Case Studies

Company: Premium Outdoor Furniture Retailer

Company Description: This company is a premium retailer of items that enhance outdoor living. Products include teak furniture, flowering plants, garden tools, home decor and more. The company has retail stores and a print catalog that complement the web site.

Challenge: Increase revenues from PPC search marketing. Coordinate messaging with print and in-store campaigns.

Solution: Build out comprehensive campaigns, encompassing entire product set, selected lifestyle attributes and other targeted keywords. Broaden reach from Yahoo and Google to not only major portals, but also to comparison shopping sites and small but profitable search sites. Manage campaigns based on detailed ongoing analysis of economic performance. Work with client team to keep abreast of upcoming promotions, and continually adjust keywords, ad copy/creative and other campaign settings to tie in with seasonal changes.

Results: Revenues increased over 10 times and profits increased over 13 times. Campaigns reinforced messaging in other advertisements and on web site, ensuring a seamless experience for customers.

Company: Precious Metals Dealer

Company Description: This company buys and sells precious metals such as silver, gold, palladium and more. The company sells coins, bars, paper currency as well as supplies.

Challenge: Ensure that campaign expansion is profitable. Since margins on different metals and other items can vary widely, precise knowledge of economics at the keyword is critical to profitable campaigns.

Solution: Install tracking system and integrate with PPC campaigns to determine profitability. Measure results by PPC search engine and by keyword. Investigate whether people searching for (for example) "silver bar" actually buy silver bars, since the margins for a keyword might not equal the margin for the actual product purchased.

Results: Profitability measured for each PPC search engine and keyword, and campaigns optimized accordingly. Actual product sales analyzed at the keyword level to determine true campaign economics and guide successful campaign expansion.

Company: Distance Education Firm

Company Description: This company is a leader in distance education, offering professional-level career training courses to adult students. Over 50 courses of study are available, including high school and Masters degrees, real estate appraisal, accounting, photography, tax preparation and many more.

Challenge: Complement the company’s strength in television and other direct response advertising with PPC search marketing campaigns that will get contact information from prospective students so they can be contacted and enrolled in the course that fits their needs. With so many courses and areas of study, the universe of targeted keywords is very large. And do all this while bringing the campaigns into profitability.

Solution: Identify hundreds of thousands of targeted keywords that reflect the interests and needs of prospective students searching for educational advancement. Write compelling ad copy that conveys the benefits of their offerings. Optimize campaigns based on what works and what does not work, including counterintuitive techniques in displaying ads on search portals as well as content sites.

Results: Leads generated increased 350%, while cost per lead declined by 80%, dramatically growing profits and making the Web a strong performer among the many media vehicles used.

Company: Large Online Ticket Broker

Challenge: The problem was poor PPC performance. When one of the largest online ticket brokers approached Ionic Media , they had a problem: their online PPC campaigns not only didn’t perform well, they were losing the firm significant amounts of money each month. They asked if Ionic could help them take what was essentially a money drain, and turn their online PPC campaigns into money-makers. They had close to 8,000 individual keywords being used on 3 different search engines, and their request was for help to turn things around as quickly as possible.

Solution: The solution was professional analytics combined with experience in optimization. Ionic understood that their client would need professional Web analytics, and turned to Tracking ROI to provide the Web analytics, click fraud detection, and content personalization that could help turn these negative campaigns into ones that would show a positive ROI.

All 3 search engines were tracked and monitored with Tracking ROI’s robust analytics, and comprehensive reports were provided. In addition, any click fraud was identified, and visitors to their site from an online PPC ad were greeted by personalized content.

Results: The results were a rapid turnaround into positive revenues. Within 10 days, Tracking ROI’s data provided Ionic with the information they needed – and new insights into what was working (and what wasn’t) with the client’s online marketing efforts. Using this information, they were able to turn around their PPC campaign performance from a money drain into profitable revenues within ten days.

This was accomplished by turning off the keywords that performed poorly, and instead investing money into those that were converting. The client was delighted to see their formerly losing search engine campaigns converted into winning ones, in a very short time period.

Company: Home Robotic Appliance Retailer

Company Description: This company is the inventor and retailer of the home robot vacuums.  The product line includes both robotic dry vacuums and robotic wet vacuums.  The company distributes most of its products through DRTV.  When they came to Ionic, this company spent most of their advertising budget on infomercials.

Challenge: The use of infomercials had made the product seem gimmickly.  Growth had been slow and they needed to super-charge their revenues.

Solution: Use short-form direct response television (60-second and 120-second spots) using highly efficient national cable as well as local television. Manage campaigns based on detailed ongoing analysis of economic performance. Work with client team to keep the spots that worked and test new spots to drive improved performance.

Results: Consumer response was positive to the DRTV campaign.  The company became highly successful selling over 1 million units.  Since DRTV media is considerably less expensive than branding spots, this company was able to afford a higher level of media weight than it would have reached through the use of branding media only. This company was named by Advertising Age as one of 2003’s Top 50 Marketers, principally due to its innovative and untraditional media strategy.