The success metric for proving the validity of PPC advertising and digital was extremely simple: return on advertising spend (ROAS). The organization we were working with was a direct response-driven organization –all advertising expenditures needed to be directly tied to revenue. Mediative knew that it was important to ensure that every click was as qualified as possible and that tracking was implemented to ensure we were able to track each and every click. Moreover, it was also important to demonstrate that PPC was complementary to all organic search initiatives and that the revenue generated from paid search was not simply shifting revenue from one channel to another.

The Strategy:

Mediative knew that going into the market with the full product line of the client would present a problem where available search inventory greatly outmatched the budget. With B2B purchases, Mediative’s research had highlighted that multiple searches would be conducted prior to purchase and therefore it was extremely important to ensure that the SEM budget was not diluted to an ineffective share of voice.

With the given budget, it became imperative to balance the available search inventory and budget to ensure that the campaign was effective. The strategy to prove the success of SEM was to establish a beach head market; that is to target all advertising initiatives into a single market and concentrate on a single product line. To determine which market Mediative was going to leverage as its beach head, Mediative worked with our client to determine which markets stood the best chance of success and which product lines were most likely to prove success.

Mediative decided to leverage a market with stronger brand awareness for the company and with one of the company’s best-selling product lines to ensure success with the small test budget. The budget could not afford to support any branding initiatives and therefore the decision was to enter a market where the brand was already well established and had built up consumer confidence in the brand.

Mediative had also made the conscious decision to leverage only a single advertising channel, Google AdWords, to concentrate the budget and not spread the impressions over multiple channels. Leveraging multiple channels would further dilute the share of voice and frequency of the ads on the search results pages.

Mediative also worked with the client prior to launching the campaign to establish the correct tracking was in place. Like many companies, the client was leveraging Google Analytics and Google AdWords tracking code. Mediative needed to ensure that the e-commerce tracking was enabled for both AdWords and Analytics to be able to provide measureable return on advertising spend. As a baseline for comparison, Mediative was able to work with the client to determine the current average order value from online customers to be able to compare that with the average order value from paid search-driven conversions.

From a keyword strategy perspective, Mediative developed a mix of head and long-tail keywords based on the individual products within the product line. Mediative selected keyword-specific landing pages for every keyword in the account. Choosing to go with product depth in a single product line, Mediative was able to develop longer-tail product-specific keywords and lower CPCs.

The Results:

Within the first several weeks of the campaigns being live, Mediative was able to demonstrate that the campaigns were driving positive return on investment. Initial ROAS was proving to be in the neighbourhood of well over 1000%.

Concerned about the potential cannibalization of current traffic and only shifting sales from one channel to another, in this case from organic to paid conversions, Mediative started to track both Organic, Paid Search and Direct Traffic. Leveraging a correlation analysis, it was determined that investment into Paid Search had a direct positive correlation to driving incremental conversions, but also had a positive effect on both Organic and Direct traffic. This correlation indicated that not only was paid search driving direct conversions, but also driving additional traffic from other channels.





Provided with the data from the test markets, Mediative’s client continued to invest additional budget into SEM Advertising. As the budget increased, Mediative was able to support additional product lines and expand the campaign’s coverage to additional geographic markets. Over the following several years, Mediative’s client increased their investment by 67x the original monthly investment while maintaining an average 20:1 ROAS.




About the Author
Kyle joined Mediative about 5 ½ years ago and has been working as a Digital Marketing Strategist since that time; although his official title is Performance Media Manager. Kyle’s passion is Digital Marketing Strategies and Integrated Marketing Communications. Although an expert in online Paid Advertising, Kyle seeks to look at the whole picture and welcomes the opportunity to talk holistic Digital Marketing Strategies. Kyle has worked with some of Mediative’s largest Paid Search accounts; managing accounts in excess of 1 million keywords and a monthly spend of over $1 million. He is able to combine his skills in data analysis and marketing ability to develop highly targeted ad messaging and campaigns, aiming to not only access the correct target market, but to speak to them with the right language. Although, his largest accounts have been in the B2B e-commerce space, Kyle has also successfully managed lead generation and branding campaigns in both the B2C and B2B markets. During his tenure at Mediative, Kyle has gained in-depth experience on a multitude of Analytics and bid management platforms such as Google Analytics, CoreMetrics, Omniture, Marin Software and Acquisio.