About Vistaprint
Operating over 25 localized websites and shipping to more than 130 countries, Vistaprint offers small businesses and consumers a broad selection of customized printed products for making impressions and expanding business. Through the use of proprietary web-based graphic design software, proprietary order receiving and processing technologies, and advanced computer integrated printing facilities, Vistaprint provides a meaningful economic advantage relative to traditional graphic design and printing methods. This value proposition, along with low pricing and personalized customer service, has allowed them to successfully penetrate the large and under-served small business and consumer markets. To maximize new customer acquisition, Vistaprint relies heavily on their online marketing strategy. Paid search continues to be one of their primary channels to not only drive a large share of traffic, but to convert it with profitable returns.
Across the board, from campaign management to reporting to optimization, Marin Software has saved us an unimaginable amount of time. What’s even more impressive is how Marin’s bidding solution has incrementally grown our business while still hitting our margin targets
Challenges Were There
With such a large portfolio of products, Vistaprint had the continued need to scale their keyword expansion efforts. Finding and adding new keywords was a manual process that required the duplication of workflow across multiple search publishers. Furthermore, they lacked the ability to quickly and easily implement, activate, adjust and pause large-scale creative and keyword testing across publishers. These ongoing tests required Vistaprint to respond immediately to performance data. As a result, they needed an effective way to monitor their key performance indicators and to be alerted of performance issues.
To maintain control over their revenue outcomes, Vistaprint requires visibility into their performance data at a highly granular level, often across multiple dimensions, such as product category, account and publisher. Generating reports to gain insight into the effectiveness of a campaign across these dimensions was incredibly cumbersome. To streamline their reporting and optimization efforts, Vistaprint needed a way to analyze performance of a given product across these dimensions.
Vistaprint reports and optimizes their search program at the product level, with product specific targets. Because products were often spread across multiple accounts and campaigns, Vistaprint was unable to execute spend towards product-specific goals. As a result, they had large bidding portfolios where poor performing products were being subsidized by better performing ones. Vistaprint needed a solution that would allow them to adjust bids based on product performance, unconstrained by account structure. Furthermore, because their quarterly budgets constantly fluctuate, they needed a way to quickly and easily execute spend increases and decreases.
Solution
Vistaprint now assists their keyword expansion efforts by leveraging Marin’s keyword expansion tool, which not only recommends new keywords based on performance metrics, but also provides an easy-to-use workflow for adding keywords to the most relevant groups. To add and edit creative and keywords across accounts and publishers at scale, Vistaprint utilizes Marin’s bulksheets and multi-edit. This significantly reduces the amount of time spent implementing and managing tests. Recurring and web-query reports allow Vistaprint to manage a large and complex environment by exception, automatically alerting them of performance issues in key product categories and ongoing tests without logging into the application.
To get the appropriate level of visibility into account performance, Vistaprint utilizes Marin Dimensions to segment and report on their large set of products. Each keyword is tagged with a product category identifier, allowing data to be rolled up across accounts and publishers. This enables Vistaprint to utilize advanced filters for reporting on and optimizing product-level budgets. And based on performance, their bidding goals are adjusted to maximize revenue outcomes.
By assigning group-level bidding goals, Vistaprint executes spend and automatically optimizes bids across accounts and publishers at the product level. With Marin’s bidding algorithm, Vistaprint makes smarter, more efficient bid decisions faster, freeing up time to focus on creative and keyword optimization. Marin’s Forecasting tool enables them to predict the impact of spend adjustments on key performance indicators, prior to pushing any changes to the publishers. Forecasting helps Vistaprint identify product categories that will benefit from changes in spend, and helps them execute those changes with precision and confidence.
Results
Marin has enabled Vistaprint to scale their paid search program with impressive results. Bulksheets and multi-edit capabilities have reduced the amount of time spent implementing large scale changes by 40%. Furthermore, the use of Dimensions and web-query reports resulted in more time savings, with 40% less time spent segmenting, compiling and reporting on product-level data. As a result, more of their focus has shifted towards optimization. Marin’s keyword expansion tool, automated bidding algorithm and forecasting tool generated an 8% incremental increase in clicks while increasing conversions to help Vistaprint hit their quarterly revenue and margin targets. They now spend 50% more time testing new opportunities to grow their business and acquire more revenue.
