SITUATION

Getting the correct account structure to allow your campaigns to flourish is the first step to AdWords success, but the work that follows is even more important to achieve that goal. With MB Fibreglass the previous agency had already put a structure in place that followed our own best practise. However the bid strategy that had been used was missing opportunities for increased sales while also wasting budget on items that weren’t converting particularly well.

There was also an issue with traffic quality in certain campaigns, for example the keyword choices had lead to certain ads that were designed to advertise gel coat resins triggering for gel coat nail varnishes so these needed to be corrected.

FOCUS

We always try to make sure we make use of any positive aspects of a client’s account, whether that be structure, ad copy, performance data etc. and it made perfect sense in this case to reuse the previous agencies structure. But the first step was definitely to address the waste through the search campaigns and by using negative keywords and actually removing match types for certain keyword sets we were able to avoid the relevancy issue with gel coats relatively quickly. From there the goal was simple: manage the bidding and the optimisation more effectively than the previous agency to yield better results.

IMPACT

The changes we made had a strong impact. Firstly by improving the relevancy of the searches we were triggering we were able to deliver higher quality scores. And by continuing to work to improve QS we saw the average cost per click decrease consistently. The client had mentioned that he was happy for us to spend more on AdWords if the return was strong and set us an initial ROI target. Once we had removed the waste and completed a few phases of optimisation the ROI improved to the point where it went beyond the initial target so we began to push certain high performing areas and eventually got to the point where the account was spending higher levels than it had previously but through our optimisation was actually returning a higher ROI than during the lower spending period