Increased ad click through rate by 3000%
When this local business client came to us, they were very distressed about the amount they had spent on ads that did not result in sales.
In reviewing their keyword search ads, we found two serious issues:
- Their current click-through-rate was .6%. The average rate for what is generally considered good is between 2% and 5%.
- They had been paying $40-$80 per click.
These two issues meant that they were paying a lot for the wrong people to click on their ad.
When you are first setting up a keyword search ad, or any ad for that matter on Google, you have to go through meticulously and turn off multiple settings in order to maintain control of your budget, and who sees the ad.
Our Solution
We turned off all of the currently running ads and started fresh with new ones. Rather than creating individual ads for each local town, we created individual ads for each service. This reduced the number of ads from 25 to 4. By creating a unique ad for each service, we could use very targeted key words for each. We looked at their Google Search Console to see what search terms their customers are using, and used those as keywords, and designed them as “phrase only”. We do not use broad search terms until further on in the campaign.
The Results
The graph below shows the click-through-rate (CTR) in blue, and impressions in red. The orange dotted line is the day we deactivated the old ads, and turned on the new ones. The chart shows that we were able to maintain the same, and even a slightly higher number of clicks with far fewer impressions. The average cost per click dropped from $10 to $1.18.
Next Steps
The client did not have a process for recording incoming calls and keeping a list of customers. This makes it very difficult to determine the true success of the ads.
It is essential that there is a method for collecting sales data that leads back to the ads. Withough this, you cannot know if the ads are converting into sales.
We are in the process of implementing HubSpot for this client, which will allow us to track sales by ad, since payments are not made on the website.
