SEM Case Study: How Ad Monitoring Helps Luxury Beauty Advertisers

Client & Vertical Background

The Search Monitor's client is a leading digital agency focusing on SEM. The agency's client is an established prestige beauty brand that sells through retailers across the US and the world. They also maintain a smaller direct-to-consumer website. SEM in the world of brand manufacturers is a bit different than for traditional re-sellers.  For example, brand advertisers need to worry about the following:

• Are their re-sellers obeying their established MAP policies, which protect the value of the brand?
• Are any unauthorized re-sellers selling their products?
• Are any re-sellers bidding on keywords they shouldn't be?
• Are any re-sellers incorrectly using the brand's trademarks in ad copy, URLs, or landing pages?

Ad Monitoring Challenge

Our agency client wanted to gain a more detailed picture of the competitive and re-seller landscape for their beauty client. At the individual competitor level, they wanted to review competitors' ad copy, their most run ads, offers used, landing pages, CPCs, and CTRs. On an industry level, they wanted to know how the number of advertisers trended month-to-month, and what were the benchmarks for CPC , CTR, and monthly ad spend.

Search Monitor Data Used

• PPC Market Share Analysis -- Used for each non-branded product category to help assess how competitive certain categories were
• Ad Copy and Offer Reports -- Used to analyze changes in copy/offers among key competitors
• Landscape Analysis – Used to identify new competitors in the space and re-sellers

With all of these reports, the agency scheduled them to run weekly and be 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 learned the following information:

• Whether or not to adjust their copy and offers, and when specifically during the year
• Whether it made sense to enter non-branded categories or not. For certain categories, the number of advertisers was low but the CTRs were very attractive.
• Which of their campaigns were performing below their industry's benchmarks for CPC, CTR, and monthly ad spend
• Which re-sellers were obeying MAP policies. Learn more about MAP Compliance.

The team used this information to set-up a more effective campaign and make smarter optimization decisions while the campaign was running.

Want To Learn More?

Learn more about our ad monitoring expertise in retail and our features for ad agencies. Or, use the buttons below to contact us. [link url="https://www.thesearchmonitor.com/contact-us/"]Contact Us For More Case Studies[/link] [demobutton]