If you’re a startup business with a small budget, you might be tempted to rely heavily on search engine optimization (SEO) to market your website. You might believe that per-per-click (PPC) advertising could be worth the expense, or you might be considering doing both SEO and PPC as part of your overall marketing plan. PPC and SEO each represent one half of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but how do you decide which half is most effective for your business? Let’s take a look at some case studies, and then hone in on the approach that’ll lead to quicker results. Don’t Settle For Mediocre PPC Management. Work With The Best
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PPC-SEO Case Study #1: Mortgage Lender
In a case study involving a mortgage lender, which is a highly competitive space, PPC was infused into the marketing plans by CDD. We linked one of four landing pages to PPC campaigns. With subtle differences in website design, goal completion rates varied. With A/B and multi-variant testing, we found that copy for “Combination 4” performed best and completed set goals at a rate of 16.8%.
PPC ads for this mortgage company ran for two months. Their top-performing ad had 383 clicks and generated 62 leads. It cost the client $9.62 per lead.
From these results, CDD strongly suggests testing ad campaigns, copy, and keywords to increase goal completion rates and decrease the cost of a lead. From this experiment, we concluded that it was more cost effective to balance their use of PPC ads in the short-term and SEO for long-term marketing efforts.
PPC Case Study #2: Local Contractor
A local contractor contacted us to help increase traffic to their website. Instead of linking PPC ads to their listings in a directory page, their objective was to send traffic to a customized landing page using targeted keywords. They also incorporated SEO into their marketing plan by using CDD to optimize product pages and create improved landing pages with contact forms. Paid search led to a goal completion rate of more than 14% while completions from organic search reached 5.25%. The lesson here is that you can have great a great PPC strategy and a great website, but if your landing pages are only so-so, you will only have a so-so campaign.
Combined, this local contractor experienced a 325% increase in traffic to their website, and their goal of obtaining qualified leads was achieved. By the 30th day of their campaign, our client had 105 leads at a cost of $7.47 per lead. The projects they won through PPC advertising were worth an estimated $37,400. The client spent $784.35 on their AdWords account. That’s some serious ROI. If you aren’t seeing ROI from your AdWords campaigns, it’s not your brand, it’s your PPC / SEO strategy. Contact CDD today to move your business forward.
PPC Case Study #3: Automotive
Background
This client is a used car dealer.
My objective was to generate new leads and have the sales team be able to follow up with the prospect while they’re browsing the online inventory.
Before this client started using Google Ads they had used another company to run ads but it hadn’t worked out as well as they hoped.
When I audited the account, I saw that they were giving it a good shot – they spent over $70,000 in paid ads in a little over 5 years.
They also spent tens of thousands on past agencies that, from what the client told me, “really didn’t move the needle much” for their business.
So how did we turn this campaign around?
Uncovering Tracking Issues
If you want to know if a campaign is working, you must have accurate tracking.
A problem I encountered when auditing this account was that the tracking was not set up properly.
I saw that the tracking was reporting thousands of leads, so that seemed off.
When I dug in, I learned that this account was counting a lead every time someone hit a general page on their site – not a thank you or confirmation page, but a general page.
This resulted in the campaign reporting thousands of “leads” that were actually clicks to a page they defined as a lead page.
I removed any irrelevant tracking actions that skewed our data and started from scratch with new tracking.
Our “goal” was placed on the thank you page so when a lead fills out a form we know that we actually collected the information from the lead.
Starting Fresh With New Search Campaigns
In our campaign research process, I work with the client to understand what the driving levers of their business are and what they want to target.
From there we decide on a theme, we’ll do competitive research to learn what angles are used by competitors and what the offer should be.
In this case, the client wanted to target a general audience looking for used cars in their area.
Since the previous campaign’s data was skewed, we started fresh with 5 brand new campaigns.
I created a separate campaign that was themed around “Used Cars” and another campaign was a branded campaign.
I created custom ads and paired them with tight ad groups. Next, I created the location targeting to limit where the ads were being served to only their local area.
Setting Up High Performing Landing Pages
Previously, the account was driving traffic to the homepage.
This is usually not optimal for lead generation campaigns because homepages are typically not designed to capture leads.
Instead, we wanted to drive traffic to a specific landing page that matches exactly what the user was searching for.
In this case, I created a landing page to start based around used cars. Competitors would send the traffic to the inventory pages because people want to browse the inventory, so we brought the user to the used car page for the used car campaign.
This way, we collect the information up front and the sales team can follow up.
Results
After setting up proper tracking, creating new campaigns, creating new ad copy, and creating custom landing pages, we turned on the traffic and the leads started pouring in.
Within 90 days we had already generated over 700+ leads!
| Form Fills: | 528 |
| Phone Calls: | 224 |
| Total Leads: | 752 |
That is not including over 1,033 site visits (Not to the landing page) and also 84 actions taken for directions on their Google My Business page.
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