Case Study:Double Performance and Cut Budget in Half With These Tweaks
Overview
Last month we had a client with a different agency reach out to us for some consulting work. Their account wasn't performing well and wanted some fresh eyes to audit it and provide recommendations. After diving into the account, we found a few major and many more minor problems that we thought should be fixed. Once we got the account back into shape, we immediately noticed dramatic improvement in these areas:
Conversion rate increased 75%
Cost-per-click was reduced 46%
Total Spend was reduced by 53%
Diagnosing the Issues
When we first got our hands on the account, we immediately recognized some glaring issues. The account had a branded campaign intended to display for all branded searches. However, the keywords were set to broad match modified instead of exact match. This was causing their branded ads to display for keywords that had never converted once and were therefore wasting spend.
We then dove into the keywords which were broken down at the ad-group level meaning each ad-group contained one keyword with each match type. This is a common practice, but there was another glaring issue: they were using the same ad for each ad-group. This meant that every keyword was displaying the same ad despite structuring the account for extremely targeted ad text.
Lastly, they had extremely similar keywords in multiple ad-groups and no negative keyword structure implemented. This was driving their CPC up by having multiple ad-groups bidding against each other, a huge no-no.
Implementing Solutions
The first solution was to simply change all branded keywords to exact match. This would ensure that our branded ads were only displaying when someone was searching directly for the client.
The next obstacle was to decide whether to restructure the account or take advantage of the current structure and write a whole lot of ads. We decided to restructure and breakdown the ad-groups by product instead of keyword. This allowed us to easily test product focused ads and landing pages with a larger set of keywords.
We then had to remove duplicate keywords from other ad-groups and implement a negative keyword structure to ensure the right ad was displaying for the right queries.
Results
After diagnosing and addressing the account concerns, we were able to eliminate wasteful spend and drastically reduce our cost-per-acquisition by 78%. This was a direct result of a considerable increase in click-through-rates and a huge drop in our average cost-per-click. Despite, spending less then half the budget of the previous month, our conversions increased by 53%.
If you have questions about your account health or would like an account audit, please contact us to learn how we can help diagnose and improve your accounts' performance.