The Stonyfield Search Study

Challenge

Stonyfield Farm is an organic yogurt company that focuses on high quality, dairy products that are environmentally friendly, economically sustainable and organic.

Due to budget restrictions paid search ads weren’t served against keyword searches, and this caused loss of SOV. And as site traffic increased the quality of site engagement decreased.

The challenge for Media Contacts was increasing paid keywords queries and optimizing budget to increase SOV and improve backend site engagement metrics.

Strategy

Using industry-leading tools like Artemis, Google Adwords and Doubleclick DART search, Media Contacts was able to determine the best time for click volume and CTR.

• We paused the campaign from 9pm to 4am because during these hours there was a low CTR, a low volume, and 8% of the budget was spent.
• We also reallocated budget to peak hours of prime search, so the campaign ran from 5am to 8pm / Monday to Friday.

However this solution brought another problem: The volume increased but backend KPI’s lowered.

Google analytics revealed keywords that brought down site quality. Media Contacts decided to eliminate the keywords that were irrelevant, then the keywords were sorted according to site engagement levels and Media Contacts paused keywords with lowest engagement levels within DART Search.

Results

Stoneyfield.com surpassed monthly volume/site visitor’s average, increase traffic in 55% and ads were shown frequently during peak hours with same budget.

Site traffic trended upward and backend metrics increased across the board:

• 14% increase in pages per visit
• Time spent on site increased 28.9%
• Bounce rate decreased 4.2%
• Winner of the Best Use of Search ICON Awards (Havas Digital awards).