Why Your Merchandising Team’s Effort is Lost on Your SEM Team, Part 2: Breaking Down Silos Between Merchandising and Marketing

Part one of this two-part series examined how to leverage your merchandising team's product catalog. This second and final installment will focus on how search engine marketers can coordinate with merchandising teams to synchronize paid search with on-site product search.

When consumers visit an e-commerce website, it's unlikely they find their desired product on the initial landing page. Chances are they use on-site search to find what they're looking for. Or they may not even care which retailer they buy from; they just enter a search term into Google and see which site has the best match at the lowest cost. Appropriately enough, online retailers have teams to address both of these consumer strategies — a merchandising team for on-site search and a SEM team for web search.

Unfortunately, merchandising and SEM teams commonly exist within silos that rarely communicate with each other. While some people hear this and worry about a human resources intervention, I hear it and worry about unrealized clicks and conversions.

Online merchandising teams spend considerable time grouping items together and deciding which products to display when consumers enter specific search terms. Likewise, SEM teams dedicate resources to identify the keywords and phrases that lead to the most relevant landing pages. What these teams rarely do is share how their efforts can be integrated to produce results. Remedying this situation and breaking down the silos will lead to more targeted web-search landing pages, more strategic keyword selection and bidding, and ultimately higher clickthrough and conversion rates.

For example, imagine your merchandising team has a page dedicated to women's sweaters. Predominately displayed on the women's sweater page are navigational facets that allow shoppers to narrow their search by specific colors, patterns and fabrics. If your SEM team knows this, it no longer has to place a high bid on the term "sweater." Instead, it could bid on less expensive, more targeted terms such as "red sweater" or "striped sweater" or "cotton sweater."

Now let's say it's November and you're having a promotional sale on all red sweaters with green stripes. Your merchandising team has even created a landing page with all sweaters fitting this description. With this knowledge, your SEM team can increase bids on "red striped sweater," "holiday sweaters" and other highly targeted keyword phrases that are likely to convert better given the promotion.

Sharing navigational facets and promotional calendars is a good place to start breaking down silos, but there are many more that must be addressed to realize a fully optimized and holistic e-commerce strategy. Here are a handful of other valuable communication topics your SEM and merchandising teams should establish:

Query logs: Merchandising teams should compile and share comprehensive on-site query logs with SEMs. By mining these logs, SEMs can discover new search terms and expand keywords more strategically.

Lists of synonyms: If your merchandising team manages a list of synonyms (think sweatshirt vs. hoody) in order to help on-site search users find what they're looking for, the SEM team can use that list to discover new keywords and increase campaign reach. This strategy will also allow SEM teams to go beyond simple web queries and begin to better understand the underlying consumer intent within a query.

Enhanced product descriptions: Similar to synonyms, merchandising teams should share enhanced product descriptions to aid SEM teams in keyword discovery and bidding. Enhanced product descriptions will lead to the discovery of more targeted and less expensive keywords.

Navigational facets: As discussed above, sharing navigational facets helps SEM teams bid on landing page-specific keywords. As a result, it's important for merchandising teams to update the SEM team when navigational facets change. If this information isn't shared, the SEM team will bid on obsolete keywords that don't drive consumers to the appropriate landing page.

Promotional calendar: Merchandising teams shouldn't only share a promotional calendar with the SEM team, but also the specific dates when promotions begin and end. This knowledge will allow search marketers to mention promotions in ads and place higher bids on keywords that are linked to products covered by the promotion. As soon as the promotion ends, the SEM team can reduce bids to original levels.

Data formats from different vendors: When vendors provide a merchandising team with product data, it can come in multiple formats. Some vendors may assign descriptions to a set of products while others assign a completely different description to the same products (once again, think sweatshirt vs. hoody). If your merchandising team doesn't streamline and/or normalize these descriptions, it must inform your SEM team of the various formats so it can categorize and mine data accordingly.

Breaking down existing silos through the strategies discussed in this article will not only lead to higher clicks and conversions, but also a more holistic and unified customer experience. With the holiday and back-to-school seasons quickly approaching, now is the perfect time to take action.

Thi Thumasathit is the vice president of new business at Adchemy, a provider of advertising technology for large brands and retailers.