What HPshopping.com looks for in a search engine marketing agency
When choosing a search engine marketing agency, consider technology, reporting and account management, says Amanda Evans, consumer marketing manager for HPshopping.com, the e-commerce arm of Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, CA. Evans has been using Chicago-based Performics to manage paid search and product data feeds for nearly two years and recently began using the agency to handle natural search.
Evans advises making sure the vendor can automate the process. Next, she tells Internet Retailer, see to it that the agency’s technology works with yours. A potential pitfall lies in the apparent inability of some agencies to keep pace with growth. “There are some agencies that are very reputable but they can only be scaled so far,” she says. “They have maybe one or two employees working for them.”
Don’t just make sure the agency has reporting, says Evans. Find one with reporting that helps build the bottom line. She says one factor that influenced HPshopping’s decision was that the agency she chose measures revenue and products sold, while many others just track traffic. Her agency measures down to the specific actions on a page and showed itself to be flexible in how it reports information.
When it comes to account management, it’s important to understand the relationship the vendor has with the search engine companies and with shopping comparison engines, Evans says. “The more they have a close tie with those shopping sites, the more HP is going to benefit,” she says.
Before signing on with Performics, Evans managed paid search with the help of the Google and Overture teams. They were bidding on about 1,000 keywords, a number that has grown to 12,000 with the help of the agency. Evans managed to place her paid search ads high but not as profitably as she can with the vendor’s help, she says. Average revenue per month for paid search increased 419% in the first year, she says. With the agency’s help, HPshopping also has expanded its paid search efforts to second-tier search engines, something the two-person in-house team just didn’t have time to do.
About the same time, HPshopping began getting help from its agency in managing product feeds to shopping comparison engines. Before, the two-person team prepared six different feeds to fit the differing formats and varying requirements of six shopping comparison engines. Now, HPshopping prepares a single feed and sends it to the agency, where technology translates it into the type of feed demanded by each shopping comparison agency. Since signing on with the agency, the feeds go to 31 sites, and the number of products sent out has risen from 600 to 950–all of HPshopping’s offerings.
Seeing the success of working with Performics on paid search and comparison shopping engines, HPshopping recently asked the agency to optimize natural search results. Because HPshopping has a dynamic site, search engine spiders that crawl sites to find relevant content could not enter. The agency converts the pages to a format that the search spiders can handle and submits them for review and possible inclusion. Evans says she stayed with the agency partly for ease of implementation. She also wanted to stick with the agency’s reporting system because it has worked well in paid search and shopping comparison engines, she says.
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