Success Stories

Metalworking Products Supplier

Introduction
Travers Tool Co., Inc. offers the industrial metalworking industry a large selection of products ranging from shop machinery to hand tools, as well as supplies such as cleaners and lubricants. Since its inception in 1924, the company has continually evolved the way it markets and distributes its industrial products in response to technology and marketing trends. For example, in the 1960s they were among the first metalworking tool suppliers to use direct mail to advertise to their industrial business-to-business customers.

Since then, Travers has successfully kept pace with current marketing and distribution trends, particularly online innovations. While pay-per-click (PPC) marketing does not immediately come to mind for the metalworking supplies industry, Travers has used it effectively to capture potential customers searching the Web for metalworking products since early 2007.

Situation
Chuck Ingersoll, eMarketing Manager at Travers Tool Co., Inc. initially created PPC campaigns in early 2007. He was spending two to three hours each week on light data analysis, editing campaign bids and keywords directly within the Google and Yahoo interface. Unfortunately for Chuck, the relative ease of setting up PPC campaigns meant that competitors were encroaching on his most successful keyword phrases, which drove up his click costs.

Chuck needed help with his campaign to drive visitors most likely to make a purchase to the Travers online catalog while keeping his cost-per-order (also known as cost-per-acquisition, or CPA) in line. Because he was also maintaining numerous other marketing initiatives at Travers, he found that he couldn't dedicate the time or resources to manage his PPC campaigns and compete as cost-effectively for customers as he'd like as competition grew for his keywords. He began to search for help, and even considered a third-party agency, but found the costs exceeded his budget. He ultimately decided to bring his PPC efforts in-house, and try using WebVisible Enterprise to automate the analysis and management of his campaigns.

Solution
When Chuck began using WebVisible Enterprise, his primary goal was to simultaneously reduce his campaign management time and cost-per-order. Using the Target CPA optimization feature, Chuck made bid changes to the campaign that he hoped, over time, would eventually lower his cost-per-order somewhere below his target cost. WebVisible Enterprise helped him target the keywords that were most effective at capturing visitors who were most likely to make a purchase. He easily identified non-performing keywords and adjusted the bids on those accordingly. He even found new, less-expensive keywords to add to his campaign to convert additional qualified visitors.

As an unexpected side benefit, WebVisible Enterprise provided insights as to how he could more effectively invest his and his team's time. "Due to its inherent nature, the product provides best practices through its Recommendations feature. As a result, I came to use WebVisible Enterprise as a 'teacher' to help me figure out how and where to dedicate resources," Chuck observed. "In addition to bid and keyword recommendations, WebVisible Enterprise also helped me find where ad text lacked valid links or proper content. Once I investigated the ad text, my team was able to quickly pinpoint and correct problematic ads."

Results
Using WebVisible Enterprise, Chuck has improved his PPC campaigns and met both of his key goals: reducing management time and cost-per-order. Chuck adds that, "The biggest changes can be seen in the average cost-per-click for the programs. Click-thru rates and average conversions can fluctuate wildly based on the market traffic or the level of the 'qualified lead' clicking through ads on the search engines, but the decrease in the average cost-per-click, and the resulting average cost-per-order, proves that the process is working." He's now refined the campaign so that he's advertising on higher-converting keywords, no longer wasting money on "non-producers," and in general is following WebVisible Enterprise's bid recommendations per keyword to keep campaign costs below his Target CPA - even for the most highly trafficked and competitive phrases.

With this kind of "tool," Travers now has the power to maximize campaign results for years to come!

To view the Travers Tool Co. online catalog, visit https://www.travers.com/.