Case Studies / Success with Skai

Walgreens Uses Skai Search To Restructure SEM Accounts And Save Time

Background

Founded in 1901, Walgreens is an American-based food and drugstore company listed in the top 20 of the Forbes Fortune 500 list. The Walgreens Boots Alliance employs more than 440,000 people worldwide with 18,750+ retail locations in 11 countries. As of 2019, 78% of Americans live within 5 miles of a Walgreens store.

Challenge 

Walgreens paid search program covers multiple business units and often has numerous practitioners working in its accounts simultaneously. There’s no single busy season for the Walgreens’ search marketing team—it’s a 24/7, 365 constant push with continuous optimization in the myriad of categories it competes including grocery, pharmacy, photo, health & beauty, and other key retail verticals. 

Over time—as with any enterprise-level search program the size and scale of Walgreens—accounts started to build up clutter, the search team knew that a full restructuring was needed to keep operations running smoothly. They also knew that an optimally structured account offers more nimble management flexibility and saves the team precious time that they can use to optimize and drive the most return from their company’s paid search investment. 

But with so much going on, stopping to focus on a program-wide cleanup seemed like a daunting task.

Solution

Using Skai Search, the Walgreens team was able to clean up their accounts and reduce clutter using automation that didn’t require a time-consuming manual scrubbing that would have been required without the platform. 

With Skai Smart Tags, the team was able to track duplicate keywords across campaigns to reduce overlap which could drive-up click costs due to potentially bidding against themselves. They also used Smart Tags to identify instances in which keywords were being accidentally blocked by negative keywords.  

“Keyword Smart Tags have been a great tool for our team—we are a lean team and our accounts are extremely large and keyword dense. These tags have helped alert us of any issues happening without us having to scrub through thousands of keywords which is a huge time saver for us!” – Robyn Feldmar, Paid Search Associate, Performance Media and Kimberly Theune, Paid Search Associate, Performance Media

Result

The Walgreen’s team was able to accomplish this complicated and difficult account cleanup with minimal disruption or distraction by leveraging the automation features of Skai Search. 

As a result of the new restructured campaigns, the Walgreens team estimates that they save 5 hours per week which they can reinvest into focusing on driving account performance.