Press Releases

PETCO Optimizes Keyword Purchasing to Increase Order Volume by 25% & Gross Margin Contribution by 11%

Coremetrics Simultaneously Tracks Over 4,500 Keywords & Products to Enable Leading Pet Retailer to Shift Marketing Dollars from Low to High Conversion Keywords

Coremetrics™, the leading provider of online marketing analytics solutions, today announced that PETCO was able to boost online order volume by 25% and increase gross margin contribution by 11% without increasing marketing expenditures through analyzing and optimizing keyword purchasing. PETCO is a leading specialty retailer of premium pet food, supplies and services, and used the Coremetrics Marketing Management Center to simultaneously track the performance of 4,500 keywords and products to rapidly identify the lowest performing keywords and shift marketing dollars towards higher converting product keywords. The Coremetrics Marketing Management Center is the industry's first independent unified measurement solution that leverages auto-sensing technology to seamlessly detect, measure and compare the performance of all keywords, banners, affiliates, portals, and e-mails in a single, sortable interface.

"The Coremetrics Marketing Management Center guided us through a rapid process of cutting out poor performing keyword buys and re-investing in top keywords," said Heather Blank, director of eCommerce & business development at PETCO. "By applying this process to just one of our cost-per-click search engines, we boosted order volume by 25% and increased gross margin contribution by 11%. Perhaps more importantly, this is an iterative process we can apply over and over again to all marketing campaigns."

PETCO used the Coremetrics Marketing Management Center to seamlessly track over 4,500 simultaneous keywords and products across multiple paid search engines. Focusing initially on the results from the largest of these search vendors, PETCO, following the recommendation of their search marketing agency NewGate, used the MMC to rapidly identify the 50 worst performing items - defined as those words or products that were generating a large number of clicks and resulting in high costs for the pay-per-click model, but low numbers of purchases. PETCO's search marketing team also identified 90 keywords which represented 25 "top contributing" products, based upon the ratio of purchases to clicks. PETCO shifted the media spend away from the low-performing keywords to the higher converting product keywords. Working within the constraints of a fixed marketing budget, the Marketing Management Center helped PETCO increase the number of overall keyword-driven orders by 25% in at least one major PPC search engine while boosting revenues 16%. An important internal metric of Gross Margin Contribution from product sales increased by 11% and the overall conversion rate for the one search engine optimized rose by 6%.

"Marketing departments today are faced with limited budgets, but high expectations to improve campaign performance," said Scott Kauffman, chairman of Coremetrics. "At the same time, marketers are overwhelmed with too much data and no consistent means of comparing performance across the board. The Marketing Management Center is unique to the industry because it enables companies to manage thousands of marketing programs simultaneously, with revenue results presented in a single interface that shows how campaigns are performing relative to each other. PETCO's use of the MMC is a perfect example of how companies can improve the effectiveness of marketing dollars and drive improvements to their bottom line."

About Coremetrics Marketing Management Center
The Marketing Management Center is a module within Coremetrics Marketforce that leverages auto-sensing technology to seamlessly track and measure performance of all keywords, banners, affiliates, portals, and emails in a single, sortable interface that is organized according to a company's own hierarchy of marketing programs. Coremetrics Marketforce is the industry's only marketing analytics platform that captures and stores all customer and visitor 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 Marketing Management Center enables comparison, optimization, and revenue-based pricing for all online marketing initiatives by providing easy access to accurate, unbiased performance metrics for thousands of simultaneous marketing programs.

About PETCO
PETCO is a leading specialty retailer of premium pet food, supplies and services. PETCO operates over 600 stores in 43 states and the District of Columbia. PETCO stores offer more than 10,000 high-quality pet-related products.

About Coremetrics
Coremetrics is the leading provider of online marketing analytics solutions, empowering companies to develop and act upon a comprehensive understanding of all visitor and customer interactions within their online channels. The company services over 150 unique brands online and was recently named the sole market leader in an industry report on Web analytics conducted by Forrester Research. 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 e-business 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. The company's clients include Ann Taylor, Bank of America, The Columbia House Company, CompUSA, Eddie Bauer, Motorola, Nortel Networks, Victoria's Secret, and Williams-Sonoma, Inc. Coremetrics is headquartered in Burlingame, California with offices in Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon. 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 http://www.coremetrics.com or call 877-721-CORE.

Coremetrics has strongly supported online privacy since its inception. To learn more, visit www.coremetrics.com/company/privacy.