Meet A Landy Award Winner: How iProspect Helped LIDS.com Capitalize On March Madness & Win Best Retail Initiative

Earlier this month, digital agency iProspect, part of the Dentsu Aegis Network, won the Best Retail Search Marketing Initiative (SEO and/or SEM) for their work on LIDS.com in conjunction with the Men’s NCAA Basketball Championship.

The campaign used strategic automation to capture the micromoments searchers were having while watching games. To achieve this goal, iProspect used custom ad scripts targeting college fanatics that would peak for the specific cools that won their March Madness games. As the team advanced to the next round, iProspect wanted to capture that excitement and turn it into a sale. In order to create this, iProspect created custom scripts that allowed bids to be adjusted in real time based off real-time scores.

The final results were an increased Ad Position of 2.2 to 1.8 during March Madness, an increase of 343 percent traffic YoY, an average order value up 35 percent YoY and 469 percent more revenue YoY. And, of course, a Landy! We caught up with iProspect to to learn more on the in and outs of the winning campaign.

A Small Time Frame For Execution

The key of this campaign was to strike while the iron was hot:

Because of the scope (number of teams and number of games) and the density of games over such a short period of time, managing and optimizing bids manually wasn’t going to be an option for this situation.

Automation From A Live Feed

One of the truly unique aspects of the campaign was the real-time bidding on the winning teams.

The iProspect account team managing the Lids campaigns recruited the internal iProspect tech team to customize existing Google MCC (my client center) script technology. Collaborating closely, these two iProspect teams created script logic that interpreted an RSS score feed from ScoresPro.com and then automatically increased bids on ads related to the winning teams’ merchandise. It took some trial and error to get the right codes implemented, but once everything was properly configured the script ran hourly and delivered on the functional goals of the strategy perfectly.

All in all, this was both a well-executed and well-timed campaign that landed a well-deserved win!