SITUATION

The PPC market is full of agencies claiming (and believing) that they have the best way to manage/create/structure an AdWords account and in honesty we also have our own set of best practices that probably works 90% of the time. But every so often we come across an account where we recognise the need for a different approach and being adaptable to the clients needs is the only way to achieve success. Of the various benefits of our service this is one of the things that truly separates us from our competition; the conveyor belt approach ignores the unique nature of every business.

Baileigh Industrial are (in online marketing terms) in a very niche market. Their product range isn’t one you would traditionally associate with online sales and as the machinery they manufacture and sell can be thousands of pounds and put to very specific uses, they have a long conversion path often with various phone calls, emails and website touch points preceding a sale. Due to the near impossibility of tracking that full journey the previous agency weren’t using any form of conversion tracking, but also from our early conversations with Baileigh we realised there weren’t really any set KPI’s they were working towards so the account wasn’t being optimised with any direction.

There was however a strong desire to grow the account, but other than by growing traffic on the existing terms by increasing bids to improve position, the previous agency didn’t seem to have a growth strategy in place. While there was an established list of keywords, most followed the exact product type names mentioned on site and there was little variety in the keywords choices. There was also an issue with the relevancy of some of the longer tail searches as sometimes people were searching for specific versions of products or looking for items for particular uses that Baileigh Industrial didn’t actually supply.

FOCUS

First and foremost, as we do with any client, we spent a good amount of time working to understand Baileigh Industrial’s products and business needs. In this instance though this was particularly important as most of their products aren’t items you would come across every day. We’re never arrogant enough to assume we will ever learn or know more than our clients do about their own products so we used them as a crucial resource so plenty of questions and research went into understanding the various nuances of their offerings. By having that understanding we were not only able to quickly act on the relevancy issues but work alongside the client to understand the different ways people might search, so for example instances where people might call a certain product by two different names.

We also developed a way to help optimise for performance. Web sales were few and far between so traditional conversion tracking wasn’t really going to give us any real insight, but to help ensure good traffic quality we started importing smart goals from Google Analytics as a conversion in AdWords. Smart goals basically count engaged visitors – so those that view multiple pages and spend decent amount of time on site, so we were able to see (and optimise for) keywords that were producing higher/lower volumes of engaged visitors. While this can never necessarily guarantee sales it usually has that effect and can significantly reduce waste as people who aren’t engaging with the site are highly unlikely to buy.

IMPACT

The improvement in the traffic quality did have the desired impact. The optimisation for engaged visitors came with a significant sales uplift and by ensuring budget was more effectively spent on those users we put ourselves in a much improved position to grow the account.

Because of the thorough research we’d done into the new keywords added to the account they also hit the ground running so lead to a further uplift in engaged users, and again Baileigh Industrial felt the increase in sales. We then aided further growth by diversifying the AdWords features being utilised to add remarketing, display and video advertising to the mix and again attain additional volume of engaged users.