When “Out of Stock” is Out of Sight: Costly Clicks that Led to Exhausted Inventory
IMPAQT Case Study: Retail
IMPAQT solves a common marketing dilemma with innovative Paid Search solutions.
More consumers are adopting online shopping to traditional in-store shopping for its ease and convenience. Yet, it has its downside. Desiring an item to the point that you are ready to buy it is sometimes quelled when learning, online, that the item is temporarily out of stock. Even worse is when you follow the item’s promotional path – only to be brought to a dead end.
One of the nation’s largest home shopping networks intimately understands this issue and turned to Search Marketing leader, IMPAQT, to help them solve it. IMPAQT had good reasons to provide a solution. If IMPAQT’s search ads led consumers to an out-of-stock item, precious ad dollars are wasted – let alone what negative message it conveys to the person searching.
The solution was not easy. The shopping network ships nearly 50 million products a year. Even a small test would be complex. For example, in one category alone, the test would need to identify and report the inventory levels of more than 5,000 products. Adding to the challenge was the fact that the shopping network could not provide timely inventory information to IMPAQT directly, a vital piece to solving the puzzle.
Recognizing this hurdle, IMPAQT brainstormed alternative solutions and devised a test that would maximize every ad dollar spent on Paid Search. The test would include the use of IMPAQT’s proprietary spiders. They would crawl through 5,000+ product pages daily to search for key terms used to identify out-of-stock items. When the spider returned these keyword results, IMPAQT knew to pause any paid Search campaigns leading consumers to those particular items.
This innovative methodology and technology helped make the shopping network’s ad budget much more efficient. And, most important, it created a better consumer experience, which leads to increased customer loyalty. Perhaps, most telling, were the results in this sample test of 5,000.
• Revenue increased by 19%
• Number of orders increased by 16%
• Average value of an order increased by 3%
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When “Out of Stock” is Out of Sight: Costly Clicks that Led to Exhausted Inventory
Getting a 900% return?
Based on average retail client data from 10/2007 - 09/2008
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