Google AdWords Case Study – Commercial Coffee M/Cs
250% More Enquiries and a 13% Reduction in AdWords Costs!
Background: Google AdWords Case Study:- This client who sells commercial coffee machines and support services across Southern England, came to us in early 2017. They had been using AdWords since January 2007. So they were obviously a keen supporter. During this time a number of agencies, including the owner, had "managed" the campaigns at various times. A total of 21 Campaigns had been tried. These were mainly Search Campaigns with a couple of Search with Display Select. At times these had produced quite reasonable results. However, in the year before they came to www.ppcmanagementcompany.co.uk they had renewed their website. Somewhere along the way the conversion tracking that measured form completions and calls had broken. So, whilst the company was receiving enquiries, they couldn't look into AdWords to learn what was causing them.
What did we see in the existing Google AdWords Campaigns?
Herein lies the first important lesson. There's a management saying something along the lines of "If you can't measure it you can't manage it." So the first action we took was to implement and validate conversion tracking for telephone calls and website enquiries from form-fills. We could then see what was working and what wasn't with the existing campaigns that we had inherited.
Now,being able to analyse the ability of the existing campaign to produce enquiries, we could see (image above) that the existing
conversion rate in 2015 was a poorly 1.38%, resulting in a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) of £100.93.
What did we change?
So we set about seeing what was wrong and making some changes designed to improve performance. The results of which you can see in the image above.
The first thing that we noticed was that the Click Through Rate (CTR) of the Search Campaign adverts was poor at 0.67%. This being probably caused by a combination of poor adverts and lowly 3.7 average Ad. position. Some of this being caused by a desire to bid the minimum Cost Per Click (CPC). In our experience we have found that being more agressive with bid CPCs, coupled with good quality adverts, helps to improve average ad. position. This in turn improves CTR. So more clicks to the client website.
The next thing we took a closer look at was the keywords themselves. We discovered that many were very generic in nature, set to "Broad Match", like >espresso machine<, and wouldn't differentiate the commercial business orientated client from the mass domestic market. So we set about creating campaigns that were tightly focussed on Commercial Coffee Machine Themes.
What improvements did we get?
In creating new adverts for the new Campaigns we had a good look at the client website to find the most appropriate pages to land visitors on. We quickly discovered that some of the Landing Pages weren't great. So we provided some guidance to the client on how to improve them. The good news is that, even though this is still "work-in-progress" the pages that have been improved are converting at a better rate. Previously the average conversion rate had been 1.38% and now we were achieving an average of 4.8%. So 250% better! Not only were the conversion rates better but we also managed to reduce the CPA by 13%, despite bidding more!
So what were the morals of the story from this Google AdWords Case Study?
- Make sure your keywords, campaigns and adverts reflect what you are trying to achieve.
- Ensure that you have conversion tracking in place so that you can see and manage performance.
- Make sure that you are brave enough with bid CPCs to get your adverts seen.
- Improve your Landing Pages to improve conversion rates.
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Author's note: This Google AdWords case study is purely the author's opinion. Max-e-Biz Ltd. has no contractual connections to Google. Trademarks, service marks, logos, and domain names are the property of their respective owners..