Eckler’s Tunes Up Search

A REFINED SEARCH STRATEGY has helped auto parts marketer Eckler’s boost online orders more than 600% and lift sales revenue nearly 550%.

Clickthrough rates increased 623%, producing a healthy sales jump of 3,737%, said sales and marketing vice president Michael Wilson. The company began life as a one-man auto body shop in 1963 and has become a multimillion-dollar distributor of accessories and aftermarket parts for Corvettes, classic Chevys, Chevy trucks and Camaros. Today, Eckler’s runs five separate Web sites for its five car categories and offers 20,000 stock-keeping units for its Corvette business alone.

When the company began doing search some years ago it had a mere 250 keywords, mostly related to Corvette-related items, plus a few general terms.

“Once we started having some success with our minuscule spending on search terms, we realized that if we were going to ramp up to 50,000 or 100,000 keywords such as other people were using, there was no way we could keep up with the bidding, or modifying the keyword lists [in house],” Wilson said.

Eckler’s situation was not unique, said John Squire, vice president for product strategy and general manager of marketing services at Coremetrics Search Marketing Services, which began working with the company earlier this year.

“When we realized that they had only 250 keywords and 21,000 items available on their site, we saw an opportunity for them to buy as many as 100,000 keywords,” Squire said. All told, Eckler’s is now bidding actively on 25,000 keywords for its Corvette product line.

“Of those, the head terms will produce the majority of sales and produce really high returns,” Squire said. “It’s really a trick to pick those terms that may only get three or four clicks every couple of weeks but can turn into big sales.”

Another task was souping up the ad copy used in Eckler’s SEM campaigns to highlight why Eckler’s would be the right retailer to provide a particular product. Coremetrics also went to work on the ads’ landing pages to make sure customers were being brought into the site at the right point for their needs.