In pursuit of new opportunities for its client, a major credit card issuer, one Booyah team sought to gain a better understanding of the competitive landscape across paid search. With so many major players in the crowded credit card category, they wanted more detail and clarity on what their client’s competitors were doing and how it was affecting their client’s campaigns.
The team aimed to learn more about which keywords the client’s competitors were bidding on and, in turn, what keyword opportunities the client was missing out on. They also wanted to understand what their competitors’ ad copy and messaging looked like. “We wanted to be more proactive versus reactive to what other companies were doing,” explained Kaitlin Williams, the Senior Director leading the team. “Beyond that, our client was simply hungry for more data.”
Despite their appetite for more data, the team’s insights remained limited to the information that was readily available in the search engines. This data provided a robust picture of how the client’s own account was performing, but the platforms’ limitations inhibited the team from achieving a meaningful understanding of the competitive landscape.
Enter Kantar
To help achieve their goals, the team at Booyah turned to Kantar — a leading data, insights, and consulting company — whose paid search intelligence tools help advertisers benchmark and improve search performance through competitive insights.
“We chose Kantar because the data is far more accurate than any solution I’ve seen,” Kaitlin noted. “The tool has all the features you might need; I’ve used The Search Monitor and SEMrush, but Kantar brings all that together into one tool. Kantar also provides competitive cost estimates and CPC (cost per click) estimates to help us better understand our client’s own CPCs: whether they were high or low relative to competitors and whether that cost impacted our ability to compete meaningfully in the search landscape.”
Propelling Growth through Testing
One key way the Booyah team leveraged Kantar’s paid search intelligence was in identifying new testing opportunities to drive growth, including viewing keywords that competitors were bidding on but that the client was not. The team also used the tool to analyze trends and themes across competitors’ ad creative and landing pages. “Viewing competitors’ ad copy and landing pages gave us a comprehensive understanding of their message to the market,” commented Kaitlin. “We incorporated some of those insights into our own program to test — to see everything consolidated in one platform made testing much easier. Having access to these insights through Kantar substantially boosted our ability to drive growth for our client.”
Kaitlin and her team found that having access to this data was also beneficial in gaining client approval to make crucial optimizations within the account or the customer flow. “The data provided clear evidence of what other companies in the space were doing, which helped our client make the case internally to get landing pages updated, for instance.”
Timely Insights to Maximize Performance
The team also took advantage of Kantar’s search intelligence to monitor when competitors were both pushing and pulling back on their campaigns. “This insight helped us flight our budgets effectively,” Kaitlin explained. “When competitors ramped up, we were better poised to defend the client’s position, and when we saw competitors be less aggressive, we could swiftly increase our own efforts to capitalize on that breathing room within the search results.” Specifically, the team employed Kantar’s customizable email alerts to receive real-time updates when a new competitor entered the space or when competitors intensified their strategies, enabling them to be more agile and proactive.
Informing Strategy and New Product Launches
The team also tapped Kantar’s search data to gain an understanding of its client’s place in the paid search universe for credit cards as a whole, which helped them measure and report on progress, as well as identify new opportunities. In reflecting on how she and her team put all this new insight to use, Kaitlin shared, “We unearthed a lot of exciting information,” including gaining an understanding of which credit card types (from a paid search perspective) the client was succeeding in advertising and which they weren’t. Where the brand was lagging, Kaitlin’s team delved into the data to determine which strategies the top-ranked advertisers were executing, including which keywords they were bidding on, what kind of language they were using on their ads and landing pages, and how much they were paying for their clicks. “We homed in on who was doing it best to give ourselves a comparison point and provide guidance to the client around how they could differentiate their message.”
Kaitlin’s strategists took a similar approach when launching new products for their client: “As we devised new product launch plans, we dug into Kantar to see what other companies were interacting with our target keyword set and to understand things like costs and clickthrough rate, so our plans could be more detailed and accurate than they ever were before.”
Expertise Plus Insights Drives Extraordinary Results
Achieving stellar results through their activation of Kantar’s paid search insights, the team ultimately grew conversion volume by 73%, reducing acquisition costs by 17% along the way. In the most recent year working with this client, Kaitlin’s strategists drove the highest conversion volume (at the greatest efficiency) in the history of the client’s paid search program, which had been live for more than ten years.
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