Replacements Ltd.

Replacements Ltd.
Jack Whitley, Senior Vice President, E-Commerce

Q: Describe Replacements' core business.
A: Replacements is the world's largest supplier of old and new china, crystal, silver and collectibles. Our company is unique in the sense that we are a niche within a niche - a segment within the niche category of home & garden. Our founder and CEO, Bob Page, started the company in his attic in 1981. Today Replacements offers over 11 million pieces of tableware and 250,000 different patterns. Our Web site receives over 2.4MM visitor sessions per month, with traffic growing at a compound annual rate of 25%.

Q: Why did you select Efficient Frontier to manage your paid search? 
A: A few years ago, when Replacements began to scale PPC campaigns in earnest, we used one of the leading Search Marketing vendors, who offered a rules-based solution for bid management. It was working fine when we had a few thousand keywords. But once we wanted to expand to over 15 thousand keywords, we started hitting capacity issues, both in terms of computer infrastructure required of the vendor to manage a paid search campaign with hundreds of thousands of ads, as well as the algorithmic expertise to manage the optimal placement of large numbers of ads with constantly changing ROIs. There was a lot to manage and our campaigns at the time were experiencing way too many limitations with the rules-based approach.

I came across an article written about Efficient Frontier's portfolio approach to bid management. This was a unique concept for paid search, borrowed from the financial world. Efficient Frontier's technology was able to automate bid management, enabling campaigns to scale effectively without having to set rules or use manual spreadsheets. This seemed like the right solution for any online business looking to scale business results effectively, and it looked good for Replacements. Efficient Frontier's technology helps optimize Replacements' long tail of keywords set, which is extremely important for our business and our large product inventory.

We chose Efficient Frontier also because of its people. With the complexity of our business and paid search, I needed to know that there were smart people that I could trust throughout the organization. The folks at Efficient Frontier understand paid search and that there is much more to it than setting rules for keywords. We have validated over and over that it was the right decision for us to partner with them.

Q: What benefits have you experienced from your relationship with Efficient Frontier?
A: One of the key benefits we've seen in working with Efficient Frontier over the past 4 years has been the ability to scale from a few thousand keywords to over 5MM, while scaling our sales, efficiently managing costs, and beating return on investment targets in a very complex online e-commerce environment. We've been able to maintain a consistently high ROI. I don't see any other vendor who could support the number of ads we have, while also addressing our extremely complex buy and sell model.

I would recommend Efficient Frontier to any company who wants to be effective online and in a large way.