A little about Service Seeking
As Australia’s largest online marketplace for household trades and services, ServiceSeeking.com.au helps customers get quotes and compare prices from local business. Since launching in 2007, they have helped over 500,000 customers find the right local business, ranging from plumbers to building contractors to electricians. ServiceSeeking.com.au business members pay to contact customers looking for their services. Acquiring more customers helps ServiceSeeking.com.au sell subscriptions to businesses—and to acquire new customers, ServiceSeeking.com.au relies on paid search to drive most of their site traffic.
I don’t know where we’d be without Marin. The ability to bid efficiently towards revenue goals based on service industry has been critical to our company’s growth. Not to mention the amount of time we now save on creative testing and optimization.
Challenge
In the services industry some customers are worth more than others. This was especially true for ServiceSeeking.com.au, as their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model brought in low-cost, low-return customers rather than high-cost, high-return customers. ServiceSeeking.com.au needed a solution that that could attribute revenue to each click and conversion and optimize bidding to maximize revenue.
The transition to a revenue-based optimization strategy was challenging because ServiceSeeking.com.au had little historical revenue data to work with. In order to optimize their campaigns based on new service industry specific return-on-advertising-spend (ROAS) goals, they required a bidding solution that could calculate efficient bids with little to no keyword-level revenue data. In addition, ServiceSeeking.com.au needed a solution that could bid across multiple publishers while accounting for the long latency between clicks, conversions and recorded revenue.
ServiceSeeking.com.au was implementing and tracking creative tests across multiple publisher interfaces and manually calculating winning creative using a third-party website. Their monthly tests were made more cumbersome due to the large number of creative that are paused and created in each of their publisher accounts. To scale their efforts, ServiceSeeking.com.au required a solution that could not only calculate and highlight winning and losing creative within a test, but also streamline the process of testing new creative in bulk across multiple publishers.
Solution
To bridge the gap between their internal revenue tracking system and their paid search program, ServiceSeeking.com.au leverages Marin’s revenue upload feature. Their automated feed of conversions and revenue is seamlessly stitched to their paid search data within Marin for immediate reporting and optimization, allowing them to quickly and easily make changes to their campaigns based on meaningful data. Marin’s URL Builder automatically appends tracking parameters to their keyword and creative URLs, allowing ServiceSeeking.com.au to track, de-dupe and attribute conversion and revenue data across their entire paid search program, ensuring that changes to their campaigns are based on accurate, in addition to meaningful, data. Furthermore, keyword-level revenue data allows ServiceSeeking.com.au to optimize their campaigns using revenue-based ROAS goals, resulting in a more efficient bidding strategy that maximizes revenue.
Marin’s adaptive bidding algorithm enabled ServiceSeeking.com.au to bid effectively on keywords that lacked historical revenue data. This reduced the learning period and limited the exploratory spend on their new and long-tail keywords. By assigning group-level ROAS goals based on each of their service industries, ServiceSeeking.com.au executes spend and automatically optimizes bids across Google and Yahoo! to hit their revenue targets. Excluded dates for bidding provides the flexibility ServiceSeeking.com.au requires to optimize bids while accounting for click-to-conversion latency and seasonal performance fluctuations across their service industries.
By leveraging Marin’s AB Testing tool, ServiceSeeking.com.au no longer needs to work within multiple interfaces to manage their creative tests, saving them time and effort. Winning and losing creative are automatically calculated and highlighted with a custom level of statistical significance. Advanced filtering allows ServiceSeeking.com.au to generate a single report for analyzing test results across Google and Yahoo! Using bulk sheets, ServiceSeeking.com.au can quickly and easily pause underperforming creative and generate new creative for continuous testing and optimization.
Results
Using Marin Enterprise, ServiceSeeking.com.au continues to optimize their paid search program with impressive results. With their internal revenue tracking system integrated with Marin’s reporting and management efficiencies, ServiceSeeking.com.au is now generating more customers at a 43% higher ROAS. Accuracy in tracking and attribution has increased their confidence in reporting and optimization. Bidding intelligently towards revenue-based ROAS goals has allowed them to hit their conversion and sales targets while reducing costs by 30%. Furthermore, the intuitive workflow of Marin’s A/B testing tool has reduced the amount of time they spend managing and testing creative by 50%.