Ice.com warms to its new relationship with Google
Ice.com is no longer giving Google AdWords a cold shoulder.
In December, following a less-than-stellar performance of its pay-per-click advertising campaign, Ice.com CEO Shmuel Gniwisch thought long and hard about cutting back its $1 million search engine marketing budget – particularly with Google’s AdWords - and putting the money into new programs such as videocasts or social networking.
After all Ice.com, No. 182 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, had spent 20% more during the holidays buying keywords on Google. But the online jeweler only averaged about a 0.50% conversion rate, compared with 0.75% over the 2005 holiday shopping season.
“Considering the strength and size of the Internet’s largest search engine, Google proved to be an extremely poor marketing tool for Ice.com,” says Gniwisch. “Traffic from Google was up; cost-per-clicks were up, but conversions were way down.”
But after Ice.com complained to industry analysts and reporters, Google saw the complaints, contacted Gniwisch and flew a team of analysts to Montreal to help the online jeweler build a better paid search and analytics program.
Today Google is helping Ice.com improve the process for picking keywords and optimizing pages.
After several weeks of conference calls, Google helped Ice.com do a better job of integrating Google analytics with its paid search campaigns. Google also is allowing Ice.com to participate in the beta testing of new paid search initiatives, including a multivariate optimization tool that enables retailers to test different combination of headlines, promotional copy and images on a landing page and measure the combinations that generate the most traffic and sales conversions.
“They gave us a dedicated team to help us revamp our AdWords account and they are helping us redesign our advertising groups and campaign structures to better manage our spending,” says Ice.com president Mayer Gniwisch. “They are very involved in showing us their commitment to making Google a more profitable venue for our marketing dollars.”
It is too early to tell if better cooperation from Google is generating better paid advertising results. “We’re still setting a lot of the programs up,” he says. But Ice.com could spend more than $1 million on pay-per-click advertising with Google if upcoming keyword campaigns do generate higher conversions. “If this goes in the right direction, we will spend more,” he says.
The attention from Google also is helping Ice.com develop better relationships with other search engines, including MSN and Yahoo. “They are working with us because they see an opportunity to get us to spend more,” he says.
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