Missed Opportunities in Search: The Forgotten Engines
Client: VistaPrint
Tags: e-commerce, google search, bing, interim CMO, performance marketing
VistaPrint and the need for an Interim Regional Director of Paid Media & Search
VistaPrint, Europe's leading digital printing company, reached out to me for a standard interim role: replacing their Director of Paid Media & Search, who was going on parental leave.
Whilst some companies decide to "let the team manage itself" in such scenarios, VistaPrint wanted to make sure their 2 million monthly marketing spend stayed efficient… whilst getting the opportunity to get a fresh eye on their search & performance strategy.
Since VistaPrint's search and paid campaigns were already up and rolling, that gave me time to deep dive into spend efficiency & search strategy.
After running an audit, I identified profitability areas and increased spend efficiency by 11% on their accounts.
How I revitalized VistaPrint's paid search strategy
- Platform migration & optimization
- Paused problematic dynamic search ads on Bing due to a cost spike, preventing budget drain and shifting focus to more predictable campaign structures.
- Maintained separate imports rather than fully automated them, allowing each platform to be fine-tuned based on real-world performance.
- Audience expansion & data segment refinements
- Introduced new custom segments to quickly learn which audiences truly added value versus those that just added clicks.
- Fine-tuned existing remarketing lists, targeting site abandoners and high-AOV visitors, ensuring budget was channeled toward users with stronger intent.
- Ad strength optimization
- Conducted an RSA (Responsive Search Ads) audit, improving ad strength for key campaigns and driving incremental gains in impressions.
- Tested low-volume campaigns and saw up to a 68% boost in impressions
- Specialized campaign adjustments
- Broke down multi-product shopping campaigns to better isolate performance, trimming cost per conversion by around 6%.
- Tested trademark strategies and green sale promotions, learning how niche changes could shift overall cost efficiencies.
- Promotional strategy updates & experimentation
- Refreshed VistaPrint's new customer offer (NCO) from 20% down to 15% after analyzing acquisition costs, preserving conversion rates without eroding margins.
- Ran A/B tests on timely campaigns adjusting budgets and placements based on daily performance insights.
Bing: The forgotten search player
An interesting point to note: at VistaPrint, I noticed that Bing was vastly underused — something that I see very often. On top of that, there was an issue between Bing & Google transfer of data, which further hindered their search results.
My advice? Don't underestimate Bing in your European market search strategy. Although Google has around 10 times more users than Bing, that still means Bing has roughly 130 million monthly active users.
