Search Marketing Technology

Maximizing Return on Investment

LinkShare Search clients are managed on the Kenshoo platform. All LinkShare Search Marketing clients have access to industry-leading technology capabilities.

About Kenshoo

Kenshoo is a leading technology platform for the professional Search Marketing management.

• 5 of the top 10 retailers and 8 of the top 10 global advertising networks are powered by Kenshoo
• Annual online media spend managed through Kenshoo: $1 billion+
• Annual online sales revenue directed through Kenshoo: $15 billion+

Key Capabilities of LinkShare's Search Marketing Platform

Path-to-Conversion Attribution

• Searches that begin on non-branded terms will often convert on a branded term. While the conversion would never have happened on the branded term had there not been a presence on the non-branded term, most bid management tools only credit the final keyword that was searched.
• What can happen over time is that the non-branded terms that drive sales on branded terms get paused or deleted since their impact on the conversion is not recognized.
  
• With the ability to distribute conversion credit to all keywords in the path to conversion these early terms get proper credit for the sales they impact.
• LinkShare has several different options for distributing conversion credit, such as prefer first term searched, prefer last term search, distribute evenly, etc.
  
• The most commonly used and recommended is the U-shaped attribution model that allows us to give 80% of the conversion to the first and last term and distributes the remaining 20% of the sale amongst the keywords in between.
  

Landing Page A/B Split Testing

• Through Kenshoo’s unique tracking system, LinkShare is able to test multiple landing pages through the ad while still tracking performance at the individual keyword level.
• This is an extremely important capability for determining the best landing pages for different terms. Our testing has often proved that the results aren’t always what we would have expected.
• The improvements in conversion rates from landing page testing can make a big difference in overall performance over time.
  

Automated Keyword Suggestions

• LinkShare has the capability to automate the build-out of converting search queries that get matched to your broad match ads.
• If a broad match ad shows for a more specific, long tail search query and that search query converts, it will be added to a keyword recommendation list as an exact match term and can then be easily added to the account by your SEM Specialist.
• This ongoing optimization and expansion ensures that over time, more of your budget will go to specific, exact match keywords that are managed to the ROI of the specific term.
  

Data Feed Search Management

• Also known as RealTime Campaigns, Data Feed Search Management gives LinkShare Search the ability to use your data feed to automate the creation and management of product specific keywords.
• Changes to your data feed are automatically processed and applied to Search campaigns.
• Examples include pausing keywords based on specific inventory levels and dynamically adding retail and sale price by product into the ad copy.

Bid Management Flexibility

• LinkShare Search has access to variety of powerful Kenshoo-developed bid management options and the ability to develop our own bid policies targeted to your goals.
• Using portfolio bid management, we can set your entire account to manage toward a single goal.
• Kenshoo has built a unique and advanced system that wraps around the portfolio optimization algorithms to enable advanced customization to meet specific client bidding scenarios.
• Rules-based bid management allows LinkShare to define a variety of different bid rules.
• Rules-based provides the flexibility for different campaigns to work towards different goals.
  

Example Bid Policies:

• CPA (Rules Based): Tries to increase the volume of low CPA keywords and decrease the cost of high CPA keywords.
• Branding (Rules Based): Pushes keywords upward towards a given position.
• Improve CTR (Rules Based): Tries to improve the CTR for keywords with at least 10 clicks by raising bids and thus position. Notice: the bid will not be raised above the Campaign's Maximum PPC.
• Increase Profit (Rules Based): Increases profit while maintaining an ROI level above some minimal value. The policy achieves it goal by increasing the volume or decreasing the cost of keywords.
• Lowest Bid for Position (Rules Based): Lowers bid for keywords in positions higher than a specified threshold (default 10) to a new bid just above the actual CPC. Additionally, increases bids for keywords below the desired target position by a predefined percentage.
• Remove Zero-Impression Keywords
• Activate Inactive Keywords