Case study
Ritchie Bros implements a winning auction strategy on Microsoft Advertising
The Goal: Drive more traffic to in stock items with low visibility in the auction
As a heavy equipment auction site, Ritchie Bros wanted to drive more traffic to product categories that had items in stock with low visibility in their respective auction. This had to be achieved without the use of standardized SKUs, since their inventory consists of a continuously rotating list of auction items.
The Solution: Lean on partners to implement a feed-based strategy with dynamic bidding
Ritchie Bros teamed up with their partners MarinOne and Microsoft Advertising to implement a strategy that would drive traffic to items in the auction with low visibility.
The first step was to build categories of products, label each product in their inventory feed with a category, and then create an associated ad group for each category. Once labeled, they had MarinOne double bids on keywords associated with available items that were receiving insufficient traffic—which would be refreshed twice a day.
Then, by pairing MarinOne's Maximize Revenue bidding algorithm with Microsoft Advertising’s automated inventory-based bid boost, Ritchie Bros was able to drive more pageviews for previously underserved products.
This lower-funnel solution allowed customers to search, find, and buy machinery and equipment that were available in real time on Ritchie Bros auctions. Ultimately, this led to a 335% lift in impression volume, a 234% lift in click volume, and a 13% increase in interest pageviews.
Leveraging a suite of tools
With ever-expanding keyword lists and targeting options, managing bids efficiently can be difficult and time-consuming. Automated bid strategies from Microsoft Advertising give you flexible, advanced tools to save you time and maximize your ad spend.
Marin's Inventory Bidding solution has allowed us to tap into lower-funnel search audiences who are looking for highly specific makes and models of equipment. The best part is that it can be all automated with a lever to control which assets we want to promote. Marin does the work behind the scenes to make sure our bids are optimized.
