A major retailer recently discovered through its tracking and clickthrough performance data that its
customer referrals from search engines was considerably lower than that
of their direct competitors. As a result, the company decided to re-
evaluate their search marketing strategy.

Using the data, the major retailer was
able to identify which competitors were optimizing search traffic, which
search engines were the most effective partners for the retail industry,
and the timing of competitive campaigns.

In addition, by using the tracking program's 'Search Terms' analysis, they were able
to determine the most successful keywords across all major search engines
for driving traffic to their competitor's sites and to their industry in
general.

Armed with this information, the online
marketing manager was able to:

1. Justify to management the need to allocate more dollars to search
engine marketing programs.

2. Identify the most popular and successful keywords that are driving
traffic to competitive sites, across major search engines.

3. Understand which search engines are the most effective for the online
apparel industry, and which search engines have been under-utilized
by the competition.

4. Track the effectiveness of search engine campaigns.

5. Cost effectively increase referral and conversion rates by attracting
qualified traffic.