Challenge
Increased investment in paid search traffic from Google Ads wasn't producing more leads. Event Academy were slowly moving into less and less relevant areas of search in order to capture more traffic but leads continued to fall.
The goal was to restrict searches to only the most relevant keywords while simultaneously increasing clicks by focusing on improved ad messaging.
Services Provided
Actions and Solutions
Rather than continuing to expand the Google Ads account with ever less relevant keywords, which was slowing eroding overall performance, the strategy was to drive more clicks and leads from fewer searches. This may sound counterintuitive but by focusing on customer needs the aim was to encourage a larger proportion of searchers to click-through to the Event Academy website.
The following tactics were key drivers of PPC growth for the Event Academy:
Campaign Restructuring: The Event Academy had taken a product-centric approach when originally building out Google Ads campaigns. However, it was clear that this was no longer meeting the needs of potential customers. Over several months Tilious completely restructured the entire Google Ads account into new campaigns based around how people were searching. This customer-first approach was pivotal in achieving a much higher degree of relevance between search terms and ad copy.
Ad Copy Split Testing: With the new campaign structure in place, ad copy could now be tailored around common search themes. As is common practice for Tilious, new ad copy was rolled out on a periodic basis in order to provide continual performance improvements. Over time, as messaging was refined, the ads became ever more effective at capturing the searchers that were most likely to become leads for the business.
Negative Keyword Lists: With any Google Ads campaign it's impossible to predict all the ways someone will search in advance. Extracting irrelevant and less relevant keywords in a negative keyword list improves the overall quality of traffic to the website over time. It's why leads can continue to grow while clicks decline because the clicks being lost are of little to no commercial value.
Results
In the first 12 months working with Event Academy clicks from Google Ads increased +22% from 17,946 to 21,878.
Leads, which were primarily brochure downloads, saw a more dramatic improvement rising +129% and resulted in +2,535 additional prospective customers for the business.
Advertising spend was scaled up over the first 12 months by +28% although at the same time the average cost-per-lead (CPL) decreased by -44% from £10.94 to £6.14.
More commonly increased exposure in a saturated market means increasing bid amounts to achieve higher ad positions and in turn increasing the CPL. However, by focusing on the right audience conversion rates rose from 11% to 21%, an +88% increase, despite a more modest increase in clicks.
