Bing Webmaster ToolsCustomer Solution Case Study

Digital Coupon Issuer Boosts Efficiency of Website Optimization Tasks by 96 Percent

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Professional services

Customer ProfileFounded in 2011, CouponFactory provides a web-based digital coupon solution that retailers can use to quickly create, distribute, and track limited-time, online promotions. The company employs 25 people.

Business SituationTo increase qualified traffic to its flagship website, the company wanted to create a targeted search optimization strategy for Bing, the decision engine developed by Microsoft.

SolutionCouponFactory created an account and registered its website through Bing Webmaster Tools, a complementary system provided by Bing.com to help business owners gain knowledge about how to improve their websites.

Benefits Increased webmaster productivity Estimated yearly savings of U.S.$4,800 Strengthened business intelligence

“From the time we started using Bing Webmaster Tools, our webmasters have had more bandwidth to take on strategic, forward-looking kinds of initiatives to increase our competitive edge.”

Wade Allen, Vice President for Retail, CouponFactory

CouponFactory, which provides a way for retailers to create digital coupons and track campaign results, needed to optimize its own website content for discovery through bing.com. The company recently adopted Bing Webmaster Tools, an online offering from Microsoft that delivers a set of content management and analytic tools through an easy-to-use console. By registering its site with Bing Webmaster Tools, CouponFactory has increased the efficiency of essential search engine optimization tasks by 96 percent and estimates saving $U.S.4,800 annually. The company has taken advantage of the business intelligence capabilities offered through the solution to increase the agility and effectiveness of its marketing and sales efforts, helping to expand its edge over competitors.

SituationOnline coupons are serious business. A conservative estimate of the valuation of one major provider of deal-of-the-day promotions, a company that is expected to hold its initial public offering later in 2011, is U.S.$15 billion.

Although a handful of direct-to-consumer web coupon issuers have garnered most of the headlines in the popular press, one company is emerging as a foremost provider of business-to-business digital couponing solutions.

Founded in 2011, CouponFactory simplifies the process of creating, distributing, and tracking limited-time online promotions. Through its proprietary technology platform, it offers customers the ability to quickly produce branded, professional-looking coupons; place them in various media channels; and then track the results.

In an increasingly crowded market, CouponFactory separates itself from competitors in a number of ways. First, the company offers its clients real-time visibility into campaign performance through a series of dashboard tools. By using the tools, clients can evaluate key performance metrics such as the number of offers printed, click-through and conversion rates, and traffic by referral sources. And, CouponFactory extends ownership of the campaign transaction data it captures to its clients at no cost. It also makes it easy for clients to let their customers access digital coupons from a PC, through a mobile application or short message service text on a phone, and even through in-store interactive kiosks.

Company leaders recognized strong growth potential for CouponFactory based on these competitive differentiators. A key component of the company’s marketing strategy hinged on the development of the CouponFactory website and optimizing this site for discovery by the most widely used search engines.

CouponFactory employs a rigorously empirical and dynamic approach to search engine optimization. “Our strategy is that we align content to the needs and buying habits of the person conducting the search based on the context of their query,” says Wade Allen, Vice President for Retail at CouponFactory. “We aim to be extremely precise in our method of creating and pointing people to content that fits with their position in the buying cycle.”

Specifically, the company wanted to develop a search engine optimization plan for Bing, the decision engine that Microsoft developed to help people navigate the Internet and find information with greater ease and efficiency. “Given its competitive positioning in the search market, it wasn’t a question of whether we needed to create a strategy for optimizing discovery through Bing,” says Allen. “It was an absolute requirement.” Allen and others in the company were particularly interested in engineering their site to garner traffic from people using Bing on mobile devices. “By optimizing content for Bing, we saw an opportunity to establish a beachhead in mobile search, which could give us a huge advantage over the next few years,” says Allen.

Executives began to define the most important criteria for a solution that would

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help the company optimize its own corporate site. They emphasized the ability to quickly submit site pages for indexing by the search engine. They also wanted a tool that would enable rapid discovery and remediation of such problems as missing pages, broken links, and malicious software (malware) infections. Executives estimated that those two tasks—configuring a single site page to be indexed and identifying errors that could impact content delivery—required up to four hours of manual effort over the course of a two-week period. Finally, CouponFactory needed a cost-effective way to analyze and validate the performance of its site in Bing search results.

SolutionIn April 2011, leaders at CouponFactory registered an account with Bing Webmaster Tools, which provides a comprehensive set of features for submitting sites, indexing pages, and tracking keyword performance on Bing. “Right away, we were impressed by the depth of insight that Bing Webmaster Tools provides into how Bing crawls and indexes content,” says Allen. “We knew that access to that kind of information would be critical to driving qualified traffic to our site.”

Bing Webmaster Tools combines an easy-to-use layout with an expansive feature set. Site administrators at CouponFactory particularly appreciate the enhanced Index Tracking and Crawl control functions, which make it easy to perform a number of critical site maintenance and optimization tasks. Through these components, webmasters can quickly identify and address a range of site errors, submit URLs for indexing and

recrawling, and block content from being displayed in search engine results pages.

Crawl Error Discovery CouponFactory uses the Crawl Details feature of Bing Webmaster Tools to simplify and accelerate the detection of errors that prevent site content from being properly indexed by Bing. The tool provides a list of the issues returned to Bing from the web server during each successive crawl operation. Through this tool, staff can view a current list of errors categorized by HTTP status codes and quickly see which pages are affected by each issue. CouponFactory now relies on this functionality as part of its routine site maintenance to find and fix such common errors as server-level redirection caused by a discontinued URL or faulty link. Company leaders have also been excited to learn that the tool has hastened discovery of code-level errors that might have otherwise taken longer to find. “Recently, one of our site administrators used the Crawl Details tool to locate and fix a relatively minor issue on our site,” explains Allen. “After they sent the error report to the developers, we found out that repairing that small issue automatically resolved a much bigger problem that one of our developers had been troubleshooting for the better part of a day.”

Tools to Update and Expand Indexed ContentTo validate error resolution, the company takes advantage of the ability to submit an expedited request for Bing to recrawl pages on which changes have been made. Once this operation is completed, new site content is automatically indexed and Bing is updated to reflect the changes. Similarly,

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the company uses the Submit URLs feature to ensure that newly developed site features or content can be found quickly for placement in the search engine results pages on Bing.

Content Blocking If webmasters discover specific URLs that they want to remove from the search engine results pages, they can use the Block URL tool within the Index tab to prevent content associated with that link from being discovered. In fact, they can use the tool to set up blocks for individual pages, directories, and entire sites. “The Block URL feature helps our team save a tremendous amount of time,” says Allen. “We just type in the URL we want to block, and in a single click, we’re done."

Powerful AnalyticsAllen and his team capitalize on the analytics capabilities of Bing Webmaster Tools to gain insight into key site performance metrics. For example, the team can use dashboard tools to evaluate changes in overall page score and keyword ranking. The company has used this data to modify the architecture of its site. In one instance, Allen’s team used intelligence gathered from the solution as the rationale for altering code on the contact page of the CouponFactory site to increase the visibility of that specific URL in search results. “Now, we have a lot more people landing on our contact page and inquiring about our offerings,” says Allen.

The company also uses this data to inform higher-level strategic initiatives, including changes to the way it markets and sells its products. For example, by comparing the relative incidence of keywords used in

search queries and correlating it with traffic data, the company recognized the need to underscore the existing fraud protection capabilities of its products. “We clearly saw a trend developing that pointed toward growing customer concern over coupon fraud, and we were able to build a strategy around that trend,” says Allen.

BenefitsBy registering its site with Bing Webmaster Tools, CouponFactory webmasters save substantial time on essential search engine optimization tasks, such as updating reports and tracking down errors that negatively impact the user experience. The company also estimates that it saves $4,800 annually from complementary access to the rich set of analytics capabilities built into the tool. Executives have applied insights gained from the company’s use of Bing Webmaster Tools to gain an edge in the increasingly crowded digital coupon market.

Reduced Time to Complete Website Optimization Tasks by 96 PercentThrough the use of Bing Webmaster Tools, CouponFactory webmasters spend less time on such tasks as submitting new content for crawling by the search engine and defining which pages to index and which ones to block. Allen estimates that his team now devotes about 10 minutes to these tasks, whereas before these operations took up to four hours to complete. “From the time we started using Bing Webmaster Tools, our webmasters have had more bandwidth to take on strategic, forward-looking kinds of initiatives to increase our competitive edge,” he says.

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“As a growing company, we definitely appreciate the cost savings…. The total value we get from the analytics in Bing Webmaster Tools far exceeds the savings. We’re able to derive insights from the tools that can help us optimize our marketing budget and bring in new customers.”

Wade Allen, Vice President of RetailCouponFactory

Estimated Yearly Savings of $4,800The company estimates that, by not having to purchase a separate analytics solution, it saves a total of $400 a month—about $4,800 a year—on licensing, subscription, and maintenance costs. “As a growing company, we definitely appreciate the cost savings,” says Allen. “But the total value we get from the analytics in Bing Webmaster Tools far exceeds the savings. We’re able to derive insights from the tools that can help us optimize our marketing budget and bring in new customers.”

Strengthened Business Intelligence Capabilities CouponFactory has used the analytics tools to inform major shifts in the way it markets its products and engages with customers. For example, based on data collected through Bing Webmaster Tools, the company now emphasizes the rigorous security features built into its offerings. “We weren’t aware of how prominent a concern fraud protection was among potential customers,” explains Allen. “Thanks to Bing Webmaster Tools, we now have a major advantage in preparing to have that conversation, whether we engage with customers through our website, on the phone, or in person.”BingThe decision engine from Microsoft, Bing represents a new generation of search. Designed with today’s searchers in mind, Bing provides intelligent tools to visually organize results, simplify tasks, and help people make fast decisions. With Bing Webmaster Tools, website owners can drive traffic to their websites by seeing who links to them, optimize for popular keywords,

manage business listings, analyze site statistics, and much more.

For more information about Bing and Bing Webmaster Tools, go to: www.bing.com/explore

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about CouponFactory products and services, call (479) 464-0622, or visit the website at: www.couponfactory.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published July 2011

Software and Services Bing Webmaster Tools