Paid search
AFFILIATE SHUTDOWN
For Q2, the Marketing Acquisition team was shutting down one of their affiliate marketing platform to reduce organizational debt, which was a company wide mandate. I helped with this Q2 and company goal by clearing our affiliate inquiries for both of our channels (Impact and CJ). I leveraged tools like Hubble, which uses SQL, to extract data from our order database. Then, I used Excel to cross-reference legitimate orders in our database vs. fraudulent orders that need to be declined. In order to save time, the PPC expert suggested bulk accepting orders under $50 and cross-reference the rest. I decided to dive deep by comparing every order in the database and automating the cross-referencing process with Excel. Afterwards, I created documentation on my affiliate inquiries process to help the next person in charge of this task. The documentation lives on Confluence and is available on a company wide level.
With my method, I saved AbeBooks $9382.87. I also helped clear the inquiries before the scheduled CJ shut-down.
FINANCIAL DATA BREAKDOWN
The finance team noticed a $1,000,000 discrepancy between financial records and the Marketing Acquisition records’ for spend. To resolve this issue, Financed wanted us to provide a breakdown of paid marketing cost by North American and EU regions. The PPC expert scheduled a meeting with me to explain the situation. He taught me how to go through our Tableau PPC records and affiliate records to capture this breakdown in the cost sheet. I followed his instructions and captured our monthly costs for affiliates, PPC and accrual costs from January 2021 to June 2021. Tejesh was able to use the documents I provided and submit it to the finance team to resolve the discrepancy.
PPC METRICS
I was tasked to weekly fill out our paid-search metric dashboards that project our monthly budget, Gross Merchandising Sale and Operational Efficiency for all of our domains. I navigated tools like Tableau, Microsoft Advertising, Excel, and Google AdWords to retrieve the necessary data. I helped monitor the PPC channel and alert the channel owner when PPC is going overbudget. For example, I identified that paid search was going over-budget for the month of May 2021. I noticed that overtime, the E%O was going down which could be attributed to
- Seasonal trend: May GMS was slowing down that week due to customers
- Under-estimation of EU GMS: Alerted my supervisor that we needed to change the formula to accurately calculate EU PPC GMS.
I also created detailed documentation to help on-board the next person to take over this task. The documentation lives on Confluence and is available on a company wide level.