Case Study: Liquidation.com

Liquidation.com Targets Bulk Inventory Buyers and Hits the Bull's Eye with goWholesale

Company Background

Liquidation.com is a leading online auction marketplace for wholesale, surplus, and salvage assets. Since 1999, they have been connecting buyers and sellers of bulk inventory in a wide range of product categories, as well as developing and deploying highly successful asset recovery solutions to serve both corporate and government sellers. Sellers benefit from a full-service solution, fast cycle times, and a liquid market with more competitive bidding through our large base of professional buyers, which enhances returns. Buyers benefit from Liquidation.com's relationships with high-volume, corporate and government sellers, which provides them with continuous access to a comprehensive selection of wholesale, surplus and salvage assets.

Advertising Strategy

Liquidation.com provides a platform for sellers of bulk inventory to auction their merchandise to a variety of buyers, including liquidators, importers and exporters, retailers, other wholesalers, and VARs (Value-Added Resellers). Because they operate online, they rely mainly on online marketing to bring these buyers in; however, the online channels they use must be as targeted as possible in order to connect the right types of buyers to their network of sellers and achieve the highest ROI on their advertising spend. To do this, Liquidation.com uses a mix of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and display (banner) advertising.

Liquidation.com allocates most of its marketing budget to PPC search engine advertising and ranks it among its most effective channels in terms of branding and conversion, attributing roughly 80% of sales to PPC. In addition to advertising on the major search engines, Liquidation.com has a comprehensive campaign with goWholesale, which includes PPC and banner advertising to increase brand exposure. They track thoroughly at the category level the number of bids, bidders, and spend per bid, and make use of goWholesale's detailed statistics and reports to improve their campaign.

Results

According to Erika Denney, marketing director for Liquidation.com, goWholesale delivers "highly qualified traffic. Approximately 2% click through and convert into a bid." She ranks goWholesale as the "most targeted" in terms of traffic, and at a quarter of the cost of other major (but highly untargeted) search engines.

In addition, their banner advertising campaign has driven their brand and generated incremental business to Liquidation.com, proving to be an effective complement to their PPC campaign.

Overall, Liquidation.com has hit the bull's eye by making goWholesale a part of their marketing mix and combining PPC with banners to target the right buyers. "goWholesale is a substantial and meaningful supplement to our online advertising," adds Erika.