Press Releases

Northern Tool Will Reduce Search Engine Optimization Costs By as Much as 40% Utilizing Coremetrics

Major Supplier of High-Quality Hardware Products Leverages Coremetrics Marketforce to Accurately Measure ROI of Online Marketing Campaigns and Rationalize Costs

Shop.org Annual Summit, New York, NY – September 25, 2002 – Coremetrics™, the leading web services provider of marketing analytics solutions, today announced that Northern Tool & Equipment Catalog Company will reduce Search Engine Optimization costs as much as 40% by leveraging the Coremetrics Marketforce™ platform to reconcile clickthroughs reported by their search engine optimization vendor with Marketforce's LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) Profiles. Coremetrics provides a complete data capture, storage and decision-support system that is deployed within weeks to deliver immediate ROI, allowing companies to analyze the performance of all online marketing initiatives with a single set of consistent cross-vendor metrics.

For its online customer acquisition initiatives, Northern Tool employed a number of vendors to drive highly qualified visitors to the company's website, www.northerntool.com. To ensure that they achieved the maximum possible ROI from their online marketing expenditures, Northern Tool used Marketforce to verify the number of paid clickthroughs and determine their true revenue impact. Search engine optimization firms, like many other types of online marketing companies, track and price on each clickthrough, despite the fact that several clicks may actually represent the same person. Northern Tool, working with their Coremetrics Account Executive, found that the actual number of unique visitors (and thereby potential purchasers) was significantly lower than the reported number of clickthroughs.

"Marketforce's comprehensive LIVE Profile data warehouse gives us the ability to develop a full range of highly accurate metrics for better managing our online marketing programs," said Jessa Fowler, Marketing Analyst at Northern Tool. "Working with Coremetrics, we discovered an opportunity to save as much as 40% on our search engine optimization vendor costs by pricing on a per unique visitor instead of per click basis. Marketforce provides us historical data that allows us to more accurately calculate ROI, uncovering opportunities for additional cost savings within each of our marketing initiatives."

Marketforce's ability to reconcile vendor-reported clickthroughs with actual visitors allowed Northern Tool to accurately measure ROI for their marketing costs, readdress their current pricing arrangement, and articulate a marketing model that was more in line with their revenue per visitor goals. Northern Tool expects to reduce its annual online marketing costs significantly, while continuing to realize projected conversion rates.

"Online marketing managers today must choose between dozens of companies offering hundreds of measurement and payment models for their customer acquisition programs, " said Scott Kauffman, president and CEO of Coremetrics. "By delivering perfect knowledge of the online channel, we help our clients sort through the clutter, rationalize their online marketing spend to match corporate goals, and create consistent metrics that are useful for managing a broad online marketing strategy. Northern Tool has made a significant investment in its website and online marketing efforts, and we are committed to helping them maximize the return on that investment."

About Coremetrics Marketforce
Coremetrics Marketforce™ is the industry's only marketing analytics platform that captures and stores all visitor and customer clickstream activity to build LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) Profiles of online customers and visitors that serve as the foundation for all successful marketing initiatives. The foundation of Marketforce is the Core Data Platform, a hosted dynamic data warehouse containing the most complete and accurate online customer and visitor information available in the market. Through a patent-pending browser-based data collection technology, the Core Data Platform anonymously gathers and stores behavioral information directly from the visitor's browser and records interactions in real-time to build LIVE profiles that are the source of all Coremetrics Marketforce reporting and analysis. The Marketforce solution enables online marketers, IT officers, and e-commerce executives to identify and convert high value visitors, optimize shopping path design, and increase customer lifetime value. Coremetrics Marketforce is a managed solution that requires no new hardware or software and is deployed within weeks.

About Coremetrics
Coremetrics is the leading web services provider of marketing analytics solutions, empowering companies to develop and act upon a comprehensive understanding of all visitor and customer interactions within their online channels. Coremetrics Marketforce is the industry's only online marketing analytics platform that captures and stores all customer and visitor clickstream activity to build LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) Profiles that serve as the foundation for all successful marketing initiatives. Coremetrics Marketforce enables online marketers, IT officers, and e-commerce executives to attract and convert high value visitors, optimize shopping path design, and increase customer lifetime value. Customers include Ann Taylor, The Columbia House Company, Eddie Bauer, Motorola, Newport News, Nortel Networks, Spiegel Catalog, and Victoria's Secret. Coremetrics is headquartered in Burlingame, California with research and development offices in Austin, Texas. The company is privately held with funding from Accel Partners and Highland Capital Partners. To learn more about Coremetrics, visit the company's Web site at www.coremetrics.com or call 877-721-CORE.

About Northern Tool & Equipment Catalog Company
Northern Tool and Equipment Catalog Company, Inc. is a privately held mail order and retail company marketing light industrial products to consumers and businesses. It services over four million customers in the United States and United Kingdom with offers of quality products at discounted pricing.

From its beginnings in 1981, Northern Tool has grown to become one of the nation's 50 largest direct marketing companies. Northern's success is derived by offering a diverse product mix focusing on quality and a commitment to customer satisfaction. For more information, please visit www.northerntool.com.

Coremetrics and Core Data Platform are trademarks of Coremetrics, Inc. Any other marks used in this document are trademarks or registered trademarks of the manufacturers or marketers of the products with which the marks are associated.