SEM Case Study: How Ad Monitoring Helps Apparel Advertisers
Sep 2, 2014 Retail 
The Search Monitor's client is a leading search marketing agency. Their client is a top manufacturer of children's apparel with an established brand name that they needed to protect. In general, ad monitoring for apparel manufacturers can be tricky due to the following factors:
Our agency client had two main challenges in the complex world of retail SEM described above. ONE: They needed to understand the competitive landscape for PPC, including the top spenders, number of advertisers, and both the biggest and newest threats to their market share position. TWO: They needed to monitor the activity of re-sellers who were bidding on their clients' branded terms to make sure they were adhering to their clients' established rules. These two tasks were complicated by the manufacturer's long list of long-tail e-commerce keywords plus the large number of re-sellers to monitor.
The agency turned to the The Search Monitor platform---and the following reports---to meet these two challenges: More specifically, the agency started by setting up customized reports with their list of keywords and re-sellers. These reports ran each week in the system and were also automatically emailed to the account team plus a few contacts on the client side. They also created alerts based on different SEM criteria that were emailed independently of the regular reports.
Using this data, the agency received an incredibly clear picture of the search landscape in terms of the number of competitors, competitor offers, and other trends and behaviors of their competitive set.
Client & Vertical Background
The Search Monitor's client is a leading search marketing agency. Their client is a top manufacturer of children's apparel with an established brand name that they needed to protect. In general, ad monitoring for apparel manufacturers can be tricky due to the following factors:- The complex relationships with both re-sellers and affiliates
- The potential presence of unauthorized re-sellers
- The importance of offers and promotions, especially around holiday periods
- The importance of PLAs on Google. Manufacturers and re-sellers often need to coordinate how they both appear for the same keyword
Ad Monitoring Challenge
Our agency client had two main challenges in the complex world of retail SEM described above. ONE: They needed to understand the competitive landscape for PPC, including the top spenders, number of advertisers, and both the biggest and newest threats to their market share position. TWO: They needed to monitor the activity of re-sellers who were bidding on their clients' branded terms to make sure they were adhering to their clients' established rules. These two tasks were complicated by the manufacturer's long list of long-tail e-commerce keywords plus the large number of re-sellers to monitor.Search Monitor Data Used
The agency turned to the The Search Monitor platform---and the following reports---to meet these two challenges: More specifically, the agency started by setting up customized reports with their list of keywords and re-sellers. These reports ran each week in the system and were also automatically emailed to the account team plus a few contacts on the client side. They also created alerts based on different SEM criteria that were emailed independently of the regular reports.Ad Monitoring Results
Using this data, the agency received an incredibly clear picture of the search landscape in terms of the number of competitors, competitor offers, and other trends and behaviors of their competitive set. - They learned that is was more competitive than they thought and dominated by companies they didn't realize were threats.
- When they trended this data they saw that the competitive landscape was anything but static, but changed monthly during the non-Q4 season, and weekly during November and December.
- They also learned which re-sellers were cooperating with their manufacturer client, and which were competing on keywords. For the latter group, they were equipped with screenshots of the competitive bidding ads which they used to contact these re-sellers and halt the unwanted activity.
- And lastly, the agency used this above results to justify increased spending during certain times of the year to maintain their desired PPC market share versus targeted competitors.