Reunion.com Brings Users, Landing Pages Together

Analysts say everyone’s contact list decays by about 30% a year due to the obstacles that separate people. Big events like divorce, death, relocation and job changes, and trivial ones like new cell phone numbers or altered e-mail addresses prevent people from keeping in touch.

Add faulty Web searches to that list. At least, that was the problem faced by Reunion.com, a social contact network that made its bones in the heyday of the Internet by bringing classmates together to compare waistlines and trade pictures of the kids. Today, the networking service has 34 million users who register for free trials on the site and enter their personal profiles. The company also maintains class lists for more than 50,000 learning institutions in the United States and Canada.

But in 2002 and 2003, Reunion realized that its strategy of pursuing broad keywords such as “high school reunion” was leaving tens of thousands of other relevant terms on the table. Research showed that many visitors who came to the site did so through either the name of their school, its geographic location or both. These keywords promised high conversion rates and, because they were so narrowly targeted, low purchase prices.

So Reunion engaged the services of New York-based Reprise Media, which compiled a list of 50,000 keywords by school name and location. Taken together with the generic terms Reunion was buying, this new infusion of terms boosted the number of keywords Reunion employed to about 250,000.

Reunion’s other big search problem lay in its landing pages, more often than not the main pages of Reunion’s Web site. These pages didn’t offer the content visitors wanted, and left searchers multiple clicks away from their aim: finding classmates.

The landing-page bottleneck was the result of a fact of search technology: Search bots can’t read every page that contains content from a dynamic database. Reunion’s pages of high schools and registrants don’t have static URLs; they’re dynamically generated when a visitor clicks on the state and town required. That made them invisible to spiders.

“By virtue of a paid search campaign, we were able to create static URLs for these pages,” says Reprise CEO Peter Hershberg. “Now a user can go from a search result for Roosevelt High School directly to the Reunion Web page that lists Roosevelt high schools and drill down from there by location.” The average number of clicks required to go from search engine to a specific conversion page was cut from six to two.

The results appear to earn an A+. Dropping down to less-competitive search terms cut average campaign costs per click by 45% while hiking daily click volume by 270%. At the same time, Reunion’s daily orders increased by 170%; revenue per acquisition grew 43% and return on investment 40%. And the new customized keywords generated 55% to 180% higher average conversion rates than their generic predecessors.