The Challenge
Our client is one of the UK’s largest and most trustworthy residential practices, providing home reports for those looking to sell their homes, banks, and other establishments.
They had worked with other agencies on their Google ads in the past but didn’t achieve their goal of higher numbers and cheaper home report requests.
This is a highly competitive, mostly fixed market. The set of effective keywords they had already used had no realistic chance to cut in front of their competitors. So, the only way of achieving significant improvement was for us to develop better strategies, relying on historical data and the support of Google’s artificial intelligence systems – in a more effective way.
Our Approach
Their account was previously running on a shared budget. This means that Google Ads decided the exact monthly spend of the campaigns and we couldn’t adjust the budget – Google did everything. Google wouldn’t let us experiment on campaigns with shared budgets. So, we changed up the strategy, got full access to edit accounts and voila! We saw great results.
Firstly, we identified the campaigns generating the most quote requests and cut them off the shared budget. After that, we could launch into the next step:
Testing!
Now, the “I think it will work so let’s just change it” approach is very risky. It doesn’t matter how much experience the PPC manager has and how educated their guess is, it’s impossible to consider all the data before the decision. It will always remain an educated guess, and we want to be more cautious with the client’s account.
So, we set up A/B test experiments with the campaigns to test out all the major optimisation steps.
The campaigns were mostly running with more restrictive match types (phrase and exact), which allows us to target more precisely. On the other hand, they also reduce the data the account can collect to optimise. So the less restrictive broad match keywords can often work better – still not always, (despite what Google Ads and new age PPC managers say) but often. So we got to test it out.
The test was successful, so we applied the new setting and ran the campaign with broad match keywords.
Then we started to test the optimal cost per acquisition to optimise for, and we launched a new experiment for that. We only went for a minor change so as not to confuse the algorithms too much.
It was successful again!
After this, we applied the new CPA. This progress is still going on and a new CPA test campaign is running right now – we never stop experimenting!
These were the major changes, but of course, the continuous regular optimisations – checking search term reports and adding new search and negative keywords – also add up over time.
Results
When we first started with the client, we had 189 quote requests for £15.71/each. Since then, the number of conversions increased by 245% for only 48% of the original cost per conversion.
By continuously testing the campaigns, we are always increasing the conversions and limiting the cost.
The client is extremely happy with these results! As they continue to work with us, we’re super excited to keep these great results!
Sounds great? We can get great results like these for your business! Get in touch with us to book in a free consultation!
