For a venture that's built around time, Calendars.com doesn't have much of it.
“It's an extremely seasonal business,” says Hilarie Pozesky, president and CEO of Hilarie Pozesky Consulting. Her agency handles online advertising for Calendars.com, a calendar retailer offering some 6,500 items. “Calendars.com does about 85% of its business between the end of October and the end of January. It really has just a few weeks out of the year to sell, and we need to be on top of its marketing.”
So Pozesky hired Web analytics firm Coremetrics to give Calendars.com's online marketing efforts a search check-up. “We initially installed Coremetrics Search [analytics software] because Calendars.com had very little information about what was happening with its organic search,” she says.
Using Coremetrics Search, Pozesky's firm developed an integrated report that quickly identified areas where paid and organic search weren't meshing. “We were able to find paid search terms that were generating a lot of traffic or revenue but weren't producing equal results from organic search and vice versa,” she says.
The result: Calendars.com reported a 23% lift in conversion rates from last August to January. A large part of that increase was attributable to finding and marketing to those buried keywords that were performing in one search sphere but not the other. In fact, the analytics effort allowed Calendars.com to expand its paid keyword list by nearly 47%.
Pozesky was so pleased that she signed Calendars.com to transition to Coremetrics' new Search 2007 platform. The suite includes enhanced tools for landing-page and keyword analysis, along with an integrated bid-management function across all the major search engines.
Landing pages are a particular concern for Calendars.com. The company's keywords fall into three categories: very specific products (Thomas Kinkade calendars, French bulldog calendars),product categories (dog breed calendars, travel calendars) and generic terms (2007 calendars, engagement calendars). As the terms broaden, the landing-page conversion rates get harder to view.
“[There's] a very high return rate because people need a new calendar every year,” Pozesky says.
Search 2007 will also let Calendars.com do what it's already done successfully — identify keywords that perform well in natural search for inclusion in paid-search campaigns. Finally, Search 2007 will enable Pozesky to set bid rules for paid-search campaigns across all the major search engines at once.
