AdWords Paid Search Case Study | Best Practice Producing Results

Paid Search success story from Online Performance Marketing.

It's always fun to take over an account that has so much opportunity for improvement. Recently we took over a national retail chain with 175 locations in the US. Their AdWords account was, to put it politely, ripe for improvement. The following is a case study showing actual results comparing the month prior to Online Performance Marketing taking over their account, to the current month. While results are not typical, they are certainly an indication of possibilities. When you have an agency that is Google AdWords Certified, you can expect the best practices. And that is exactly what our client has received.

Before I show the results, I'll give a little insight into what I did to reorganize their account.

1. Micro ad groups - some ad groups had more than 140 keywords in them, not all related, and the ad copy did not contain the keywords being targeted. By breaking these keywords into their own ad groups, with target ad copy, we were able to increase the Quality Score, and Click Through Rate.
2. Geo Targeting. With 175 stores, in all but 13 states, the client was targeting at the state level. This meant that someone outside of the store's physical location - say 300 miles or more, might see the ad, then find out there wasn't a location near them. So I implemented a location based geo targeting solution with a 25 mile radius around each store. This way we were actually targeting the searchers most likely to visit the store.
3. I got rid of all the broad match keywords and used modified broad match, phrase and exact match. Removing the "related searches" helped us eliminate search queries that were not appropriate for the client.
4. The original campaign had content, smart phone, and search/search partners all in one campaign. By breaking these out into their own campaigns (and eliminating content network for now) we were able to bid higher on smart phones (you need to be in the top 1 position if you want people to see your add), and focus the attention on search/search partners. We also implemented click to call on smart phones, location extensions, and sitelinks (an incredible opportunity to showcase special offers and deep linking).
5. Added more negatives - they didn't have any.

So with the same budget, a more organized and tightly themed account, and a strong smart phone bidding strategy we saw an increase in clicks of 181%, while reducing cost by 3.3%. As expected, when you remove statewide GEO and the content network, we saw a drop in overall impressions of 93.6% but the quality of the traffic was so much better that our Click Through Rate increased 45x, from .21% to 9.47%. This increase in CTR also improved our Quality Score, so our AVG CPC dropped 65.6%. The conversion rate increased 75x from .49% to 36.88%, and the cost per conversion dropped 99.5% from $184.03 to $0.84. From 19 conversions for the period before we took over, to 4,036 in the period after we took over.

See for yourself.

If you'd like to have a Free AdWords Paid Search Audit, please call Online Performance Marketing at 877-676-2010.