Cutting CPCs, Not Corners: Streamlining Avon Bids

Avon North America is a 135+ year old company comprised of two core business functions.

Not only are they the leading social selling beauty company in North America with their recruitment of in-field Avon representatives but they also run a sizeable e-commerce business via AVON.COM. Avon is also part of the LG H&H family, the #1 consumer goods company in Korea.

Challenge

With both Avon’s business functions bidding on the same Brand terms, keyword cannibalization resulted in artificially inflated CPC’s.

TMI’s overall objective was to reduce the cost of Brand terms by testing moving from dual auction entry to a single auction entry. It was critical that overall Revenue, Lead and Contract volume driven through branded search in a dual auction setting was maintained.

Hypothesis

Before any planning was possible we structured a cost saving and benefit’s hypothesis with defined benchmarks and success indicators. Product downtime resulting in media pauses, allowed us to extrapolate expected CPC and QS impact. The hypothesis was proposed and approved for testing against a rigorous testing schedule.

Deployment

Data Overlay

To resolve internal politics, the GWP solution was restricted for AVON.com customers linked to a representative. Using customer match data, only unattached customers received the single auction entry. We passed real-time audience updates via DoubleClick to AdWords, ensuring data integrity. Attached customers were targeted separately through brand campaigns with the old dual entry experience.

Conversion Volume Testing

Due to the complexity, AdWords experiments couldn’t be used for A/B testing. Instead, we implemented a testing schedule that varied the GWP experience across 25%, 50%, and 100% of daily search impressions at different times over four months. This approach minimized external variables, ensuring consistent results with dual auction entry benchmarks.

Creative and Copy Testing

In collaboration with creative teams, we developed multiple page iterations to test and optimize performance. The testing involved comparing simplistic pages versus more information-heavy ones, sequentially directing traffic to these pages over several weeks to refine the landing page experience

Results

Against original parameters, success was tracked in real time to confirm impact on product performance. Using Doubleclick Campaign Manager, outbound clicks were tracked as separate campaigns in order to ensure that costs (now shared) could be apportioned correctly. Additionally, DCM Floodlight data allowed for the tracking of leaked events via static page elements.

$700,580

Estimated budget reclamation

-80%

Overall CPC reduction

+272%

Increase in ROAS