In addition to traditional methods like email list growth and social media engagement, Musictoday proposed launching year-round paid search campaigns to bolster store traffic.

Paid search is different from traditional marketing channels because the customer has already signaled their intent by performing a search. Think of it as a customer walking into a brick-and-mortar store to browse – it doesn’t matter if you have a sale running, or a new product line to push, this is a customer who is already shopping.

So unlike prior paid search campaigns which showcased new releases or preorders from individual artists, these year-round campaigns would allow any product in the Century Media store to be advertised – as long as it was relevant to the user’s search. Additionally, text ads were shown to users searching for what we call “evergreen” keywords – generic, store-level terms like ‘Century Media Store’ or ‘Century Media Vinyl.”

While these year-round campaigns were running, we also saw significant sales growth from organic search – proving that the paid search campaigns did not “cannibalize” traffic from the unpaid organic search channel.