Yahoo Search Marketing has been working with one of its travel advertisers, Pleasant Holidays, on an analysis of multi-channel keyword effectiveness.
Yahoo worked in partnership with Who’s Calling, a third- party provider of cross channel analytics. According to Brad King, Yahoo Search Marketing executive able to highlight areas that were working well for Pleasant Holidays and places that needed improvement.
Pleasant Holidays changed its search strategy in a number of ways; one was increasing its investment in sponsored search.
The company now sends search-generated calls to sales agents, after discovering that close to 85 percent of these calls are chances to make sales instead of calls for customer service support.
By looking at all of its sale channels driven by search marketing, Pleasant Holidays had a foundation for online advertising analysis beyond bid management tools.
The company changed the way it managed its ad groups, by focusing more on its travel destinations instead of its top online keyword performers, after learning that some lower- performing keywords were creating strong call volume and conversation.
They also applied a cost-per-acquisition metric to destinations that did not book well online, realizing that the company can grow into new markets, but each market will have different attributes.
According to Yahoo, after receiving the results, Pleasant Holidays had a better understanding of its overall cost-per-acquisition through online channels.
The company viewed the keywords it was bidding on in a new way and was able to set cost-per-click limits based on analysis of online lead-generation to online and offline sales.
“Creating an optimized search marketing program is really only the first step in using the Web to help build your business. Just as important – if not more – is maintaining an understanding of how your strategy is working over time,” said King.
“By using analytics like these, we can work with our advertisers to more effectively fund their search marketing campaigns and ultimately, play a role in helping them be more successful in closing business.”
