Case: promotion of a Western subscribe project in Ads

Содержание

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Content

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Background information

Client: Agency for the development and promotion of SaaS and subscribe products.

Region: USA and Canada.

Service: PPC audit of previous work, changing the strategy for scaling the account, implementing a new strategy, setting up new campaigns/ads/keywords, changing targeting settings.

Working process

The client’s company develops and promotes SaaS and subscription products. It leads 11 projects with a total income of $8 million/month; we started working with two of them. In this case, we will tell the story of working with one of the projects. According to the NDA, we cannot disclose the name of the project, but we want to note that the developers have created a really necessary product that solves actual problems and brings real benefits in its niche.

Audit

To begin with, it was important for us to assess the current state of the client’s campaigns in order to understand where we are now and where we can move.

The client had standard advertising campaigns in the search. The three campaigns differed in that they had words with different match types:

the first campaign is a modified broad match (they were still working then);
the second is a copy of the first, but with phrase type;
the third is a copy of the first, but with exact type.

Brand/commercial/information traffic was not shared between campaigns: visits from all three types of requests were mixed.

Further, during the audit, we relied on the set goals and looked how to achieve KPI. To do this, we have developed several rules:

focus on the main metrics, in our case, reducing the cost per conversion from $80 to $50;
improvement in order from largest to smallest. First, to need to find the campaign with the highest share of traffic and work with it. This will give the most tangible results. We started with the largest (by keyword size) campaigns;
maximization: when the goals are achieved, we analyze the most effective solutions and, if possible, apply them to all ads.

For example, while working, the {Keyword:…} construction worked perfectly for us. Such ads received 20-30% higher CTR than the rest. After applying this principle to the remaining campaigns, we were able to noticeably improve ad results.

Transactions:

It turned out that the client in the search campaigns had the setting «People who are looking for or showing interest in the target location (recommended)». We changed targeting to «People in your target location» and immediately stopped spending money on dummy visits from India, the UK, Australia, Pakistan and other countries.

This allowed us to save 40% of the monthly budget that we invested in experimental campaigns.

Keywords and search terms

The client had a large list of 3000 keywords, while the share of impressions of search campaigns was only 17.97%.

Impression share – how many impressions our ads receive relative to our competitors. For example, an impression share of 10% means that 10% of the displayed ads in search belong to us, and the remaining 90% belong to other businesses. The higher the share of impressions, the more and more often the user sees our ads. The number of possible impressions depends on your targeting settings, budget, ad quality, and other factors.

To increase the impression share, we used the Alpha / Beta strategy, implemented the SKAg structure and the division of campaigns by region. For the last intake, we grouped all regions by efficiency and divided the budget more fairly. Also, for each campaign, we set our own ad position, for example, for alpha at least 1.5, for beta – 3.2.

As a result, the impressions share of search campaigns increased to 24.44%.

In most campaigns, the ad text was not relevant. We changed it, made it more relevant, and CTR increased from 3.69% to 5.28%.

We also made many small changes. In general, we use the drag and drop strategy:

1 campaign – 1 region;
separation of campaigns with a high probability of conversions and different types of targeting (by location, audience) for different campaigns;
1 ad group – 3 ads with A/B/C testing;
1 ad group – 4 keywords;
1 ad group – 1 landing page;

Drag and drop is a strategy based on the principle of super-segmentation, in which we must create a relevant account structure.

This strategy has helped us achieve a good Quality Score, resulting in the best CPCs and, as a result, the best CPA, which is important for this type of business.

Results

	Before	After
Conversion rate	1.01 %	2.01 %
Advertising costs (month)	28,550 $	15,617 $
Income	28,801 $	22,571 $
Bounce rate	56.06 %	38.29 %
CPA	81.81 $	47.59 $

Google Analytics statistics before and after our work.

Campaigns before optimization:

Campaigns after optimization:

Important point!

You can see that after our work, the company’s income technically decreased. And this is the case when it is important to use the principle “dig deep, look for the main thing.” Because in addition to income, advertising costs have also decreased. This means that we began to earn a little less and spend much less – and therefore the final net profit became more than it was before our work.

in terms of income, our work is unsuccessful, but in terms of profit, ROI – the business began to earn more money. Isn’t that the ultimate goal of any advertisement?…

Conclusions

It is always worth starting with simple ways. The more traffic a campaign generates, the faster ad results will improve after making changes. The easier it is to achieve the desired results from one action, the more likely it is with this action that you need to start. Always take the easiest route to reach your target metrics and follow it.
The division of traffic by request type is still relevant. Brand, commercial (grocery) and informational traffic has different temperatures, different purchase intentions, different prices, different interests. You need to work with him in different ways. Therefore, it is also necessary to attract such traffic separately.
Successful solutions need to be shared. If a particular type of headline, description, or CTA performs noticeably better in campaigns, this principle should be extended to the rest of the ads/ad groups/campaigns.
Traffic is good, but transactions are important for ecommerce. If some of the traffic does not bring conversions even in the long term, you should think about how to stop paying for its clicks.
The right metrics and vision of the big picture is the key to understanding how advertising for business really works. The closer the metrics are to the business, the better. Because in fact, the business does not care what CTR advertising campaigns have. What matters is the final indicator: how much money this advertising brings and how it pays for itself.