Office Depot

Paid search strategy increases online
transactions & revenue for Office Depot

Challenge

Research shows that 77% of all customers read reviews before making a purchasing decision* and Office Depot wanted to capitalize on this decision-making process. In early 2008, Office Depot added consumer-generated reviews to their site through Bazaarvoice, allowing consumers to provide their feedback and seek the opinions of others for specific products.

Office Depot challenged 360i to incorporate this new feature into their search engine marketing efforts in order to increase traffic and online sales.

Solution

360i incorporated verbiage from the product reviews into the ad copy to differentiate top rated products and integrate the social appeal of consumer-generated content into the search experience. 360i focused on top-rated products that also had a large volume of reviews to ensure that the information remained credible and useful to the searcher.

Keywords included terms related to product reviews, which were designed to capture consumers during the consideration process. The tailored ad messaging around user feedback on related products further encouraged searchers to click on the Office Depot listings. The campaign keywords and ad creative were regularly updated to ensure the most relevant and top-rated products were supported via search.

Results

In order to measure the success of this new strategy, 360i performed a split serve creative test. The test showed that ad creative featuring messaging around product reviews significantly outperformed the more "traditional" ad creative. Office Depot enjoyed other enhanced performance results as a result of the campaign:

• Increased Revenue by 196.6%
• Increased Conversion by 23.8%
• Increased Transactions by 186.7%
• Increased New Buyers by 183.3%
• Increased CTR by 78.5%

* Jupiter Research, August 2006