Site Meets Solution: A Modern Love Story

She was young, attractive, and successful, but needed someone to help her increase online conversion rates. He was just a few years her senior, popular in his field, and able to give her just what she needed. They met over dinner and felt a connection. Within a year they had gotten hitched worked on their relationship, and produced a wonderful offspring: a beautiful, healthy return on investment. The is the story of My Wedding Favors, an e-retailer catering to the engaged, and Kefta, a provider of online marketing solutions. My Wedding Favors started in January 2004 as a pet project of Jennifer Fallon and her husband, Brad, which the couple operated from their basement. In the first month the site, operating as a Yahoo! store, brought in $11,000, and grew rapidly from there. Over the next two years the work force jumped to fifty and the site saw a $15 million revenue in 2005. Much of the Fallons' initial success came out of organic search traffic. The site's rich content and high word numbers on the home page had it consistently appearing within the top two or three results for search terms. But although the site saw a staggering amount of traffic it stagnated, unable to kick conversion rates up to the next level. Curiously, it was at an awards dinner at which My Wedding Favors was being honored for its search success that the Fallons found Kefta. Instead of using the occasion to celebrate how far they had come, the couple opted to improve their business. CEO Brad Fallon says he had no idea that services to help target organic search existed. "As soon as I found out about this," he says, "I knew we needed it." More research and reviews of other options drove the couple to implement the Kefta Dynamic Targeting solution in the beginning of 2006. Kefta found that prior to the implementation My Wedding Favors had no way of leveraging valuable information customers provided about their buying desires through their specified search terms. Because of the lack of targeting, says Mark Ogne, vice president of marketing services for Kefta, "the selling position basically had to be the Ginsu knife." The implementation took only a few business days once My Wedding Favors had its creatives in place. The company decided to start out the integration with a two-month long testing period, during which half the searches directed potential customers to a targeted page with search-specific content, while the other half of searches brought users to the generic home page. The results were undeniable: The site's overall conversion rate went up 65 percent; conversion rates for specific terms skyrocketed. "Unique favors" jumped from a 0.51 to 1.19 percent conversion, while the rates for "beach favor" leaped from 0.57 to 1.28 percent. My Wedding Favors was also able to test different banners and promotional links to gauge response. "Now we can really play in the big leagues," Brad Fallon says. The improvements My Wedding Favors has been able to make by using Kefta have helped the company, which recently moved off Yahoo! platform, to expand. "When you have this kind of tool," Brad Fallon says, "you can change the whole thinking of an organization. You can't have an I-think-this-looks-better mentality--the answer is always, 'Well, let's test them.'" The Payoff By using Kefta's Dynamic Targeting solution, My Wedding Favors:

upped site conversion by 65 percent;

saw conversion for targeted search terms jump by as much as 125 percent; and

tests images and copy the bolster future conversion rates