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For the past 5 years, a National Bus Sales and Parts company had been advertising online through Adwords paying at least $1500/month getting little to no phone calls or leads. They had hired 6 Digital Marketing Agencies before us and not one could seem to bring substantial leads to justify their ad spend. Not only were they running Adwords campaigns but they were also paying thousands of dollars for virtually nonexistent SEO rankings. Their expenses were not covering the revenue coming in and they were drowning more and more every month. They were running out of options and ready to throw in the towel. Here is a screenshot of their Adwords data for the month of July, 2015.
Bus Company: July, 2015 Adwords Data
As you can see from the data above, they spent a total of $1,553.65, had 2023 clicks to their site and only had one conversions (phone call) directly attributed to their campaign. Also note, their CTR (Click Through Rate) was 2.06%, Average CPC was $.77 and their Average Positon was 3.5.
Typically, if you can get over 2000 people to your website every month and only pay $.77 per click, you would have an efficient campaign. However, that is not always the case. This company, as well as most others, primarily determine the overall success of a campaign by the number of quality leads, sales and overall return on ad spend. Even though they got so much traffic, all they could show for was one call conversion and over $1,500 less money in their pocket.
Here is a screenshot of the keywords tab of their campaign showing a brief summary of what keywords they were paying for.
As their July keyword data portrays, they received 378 clicks from the broad match terms buses price, bus for sale and buses new. Most inexperienced advertisers use broad match keywords as their primary or only match type in Adwords. This is definitely not best practice because the broad variations can branch out to terms that are in no way associated with the product or service an advertiser is selling. Unless you have thousands of negative keywords to block these irrelevant variations from triggering your ads, only using broad match keywords is going to waste your money. Even though this client wanted to show up for buses price, bus for sale and buses new; here is a detailed report from the search terms tab to show the exact keyword phrases were triggering their ads and what they were actually paying for. To access this search terms report, click the dimensions tab, then click the tab that says “view day” and select the “search terms” option.
These are only the top 13 keyword phrases that triggered their ads and led to clicks. As you can see, they received 15 clicks from the phrase “bus ticket prices”, 11 clicks on the phrase “bus to atlantic city round trip”, 7 clicks on “bus fares” and 8 clicks on “school bus for sale” when they don’t even sell any school buses or offer fares. This shows the importance of adding a comprehensive negative keyword list and more importantly using phrase, exact and broad match modified keywords instead of broad keywords for your targeting.
I shared this information with the company and we were both flabbergasted that not one of the 6 prior digital marketing agencies caught this. We completely restructured their campaign and they had one more shot to save their business before risking closing down the business.
Within one month of running their new updated Adwords campaign, they received 12 conversions (phone calls lasting longer than 2 minutes) and sold a $60,000 bus directly coming from an Adwords click. They sold plenty of other bus parts and had other promising leads for bus sales. This was a breath of fresh air but we still knew we could improve this month over month.
In September, 2015, they had 52 total phone calls and 25 conversions (phone calls lasting longer than 2 minutes). Not only were they getting a lot of calls but they were selling more buses than ever before and parts were flying off the shelves faster than they could stock them!
Here are a few of the key performance indicators when comparing the new September Adwords report to the old July report.
Other than the obvious substantial increase in conversions, one other major factor to consider is the 4x higher click through rate than before. This means that users click the new ads much more often because the ads are more relevant to what users are actually looking for and their ads appear higher up the page. Even though the average cost per clicks are about twice as high as their previous campaign, the actual phrases people are typing in now to trigger their ads are exactly on track with their targeting focus and they are not paying for irrelevant clicks.
Here is a screenshot of their most clicked exact search terms for September to reflect their drastic increase in sales. As you can see, they had 77 clicks on “used buses for sale”, 52 clicks on “cheap used buses for sale” and 40 clicks on “buses for sale”.
As an ethical Digital Marketing Agency, we truly care about our clients’ success. We would love an opportunity to help increase your online leads, sales and overall revenue. Please contact us at 754-229-3343 for a free comprehensive quote.