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

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.