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It takes a bold approach to shake up an existing market. Discount Office Items, a rapidly growing online retailer, and Adlucent, an innovative retail search marketing firm, are doing just that in their respective markets.

Founded in 2003, Discount Office Items is competing successfully with “big box” and large Internet retailers by making it easy for customers to compare its prices side-by-side with the competition’s on its Web site. Combined with fast shipping and top-notch customer service, this approach has helped Discount Office Items drive double-digit growth. In 2009 the company became one of the 500 largest Internet retailers.

To continue fueling its rapid growth, Discount Office Items needed a search marketing partner that could help the company drive new revenue profitably. After an extensive review, only one firm stood out. The company chose Adlucent, a retail search leader that partners with some of the world’s largest online retailers.

Pay for Performance Model Guarantees Results

Like Discount Office Items, Adlucent has embraced a strategy unlike any of its competitors. Rather than basing its compensation on a percentage of ad spend, Adlucent offers a “pay for performance” model that guarantees its clients’ success. For Discount Office Items, that means Adlucent actually absorbs the cost of the company’s search marketing campaigns, and gets compensated only as the campaigns generate revenue. Discount Office Items CEO Tim Horton says Adlucent’s performance-based model is unlike any other he has seen in the industry.

“Adlucent is the only search marketing firm we found that guarantees results by tying its compensation to our success,” says Horton. “Their pay for performance model gives me the confidence that our campaigns are optimized to hit revenue targets, rather than monthly spending goals. That means I no longer have to worry about whether our ad budget is being spent in the right place, because we both have the same motivation.”

Ten Times the Online Presence

As an experienced etailer, Discount Office Items already employed an extensive search marketing program. But with thousands of products and dozens of categories to promote, the campaigns were growing more difficult—and expensive—to manage.

To expand Discount Office Items’ online presence profitably, Adlucent used its Deep Search™ platform, developed specifically to manage complex retail campaigns with millions of products. Using Deep Search, Adlucent was able to reallocate time and money to the products and categories likely to be most profitable for Discount Office Items. The result: Adlucent expanded the retailer’s keyword coverage by 1,000%.

Driving Profitable Growth

As a young competitor in a large, established market, Discount Office Items competes by offering consistently low prices on a wide selection of products. To capitalize on this advantage, Discount Office Items provides Adlucent with a daily product feed down to the SKU level, along with key information such as pricing and promotional schedules. The Adlucent team uses this information to quickly identify and promote competitively priced products, instead of wasting ad spend on less profitable products and categories.

Horton believes the partnership with Adlucent will be a key factor in driving the company’s continued growth. “As our revenue numbers grow, it gets that much more challenging to sustain double-digit growth. With Adlucent, we now have the right strategy in place to attract new customers and grow profitably.”