Etail Canada 2017 took place from May 16-18 in Toronto at the Hyatt on King Street. The yearly event brings together top retailers in Canada, as well as some of the brightest Digital Marketing and Ecommerce minds in the field. It was the 6^th edition of the Etail Canada event, part of the WBR events series, and was one of the best. (Disclosure: I am on the Etail Canada Board of Advisors).

Etail Canada introduced an awards program this year. Mark’s submitted for Best Paid Search Program (of 2016). I was honoured to accept the award right after my Etail Canada Presentation. Event Director Megan Kessler came on stage and announced that Mark’s had won, and presented us the fabulous award. That was a nice touch by Megan.

Some Highlights of Mark’s 2016 Paid Search Program:

• Mark’s in-store strategy continued to progress throughout 2016 by pulling insights from our brick and mortar visits from Google Adwords.
• Product Listing Ads (PLAs) or Google shopping ads, became a much more important piece of Mark’s paid search in 2016. In 2016, Mark’s worked with a new Ecommerce product feed provider who helped build out a best-in-class product feed for paid search. Getting a best-in-class feed was only the beginning as late in 2016 Mark’s worked on adding GTINs and local inventory to the program.
• A mobile search strategy was implemented to make the most efficient use of dollars and capture the most valuable searching customers. Bid modifiers were put in place to increase the bid for customers who searched within a specific radius of a Mark’s store.
• In February 2016, Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) launched as a beta with the Google team. This allowed Mark’s website to gain crawler capabilities, which allowed Mark’s to promote more relevant ads to potential customers. Mark’s also took advantage of Enhanced Text Ads (ETAs).
• Mark’s implemented event tracking and increased remarketing list search ad bids to make sure we captured customers who had previously shopped or visited our website. Mark’s also used remarketing within paid search to increase bidding when a searcher had seen or interacted with a display or video campaign.
• For Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Mark’s created a bidding structure to ensure dollars were correlated with the strategies outlined for the program. A real-time spreadsheet was created that monitored performance and budget, enabling immediate adjustments to be made to ensure relevant search share-of-voice was not missed, or taken by a competitor. The real-time spreadsheet made optimizing more nimble during the busiest time in the retail year.

[Read more…]