HOW WE LEVERAGED ADS TO DRIVE 393% MORE CONVERSIONS IN LESS THAN EIGHT MONTHS

To begin addressing this challenge, we audited Seacoast's account to find opportunities. In doing so, we discovered three main areas to take on:

• Campaign Budget Allocation
• Ad Copy Testing
• Display Network Advertising

After the audit, we realized the client's campaign budgets were being assigned based on location and business vertical; this distribution didn't allow for optimal performance. Products with a low cost per conversion were underfunded, while highly-competitive keywords were eating through the client's marketing budget.

The solution was to work with the client in reallocating campaign budgets to the campaigns that drove the lower cost per conversion.

This helps us steadily decrease cost per conversion from $44.66 in January to $22.70 by April and $8.89 by September... that's a whopping 80% decrease in CPC!

Despite the reduced working budget, these fund reallocation improvements drove significantly more leads for Seacoast. More importantly, these budget shifts took into account which products drove the most revenue for the business, which not only helped increase leads, but also helped to improve the overall lead quality. These wins were significant for our client, but our wasn't finished yet.

Ad Copy Testing: Having addressed these issues and defining which target audiences to show our ads to, it was time to address message content. In determining how to engage the audience, we found our ads weren't getting clicked as often as they needed to drive a sufficient number of new customers. The ad copy spoke to the client's products and benefits but was not tailored to each set of keywords in a way that would attract searchers to chose our ads over a competitor's ads.

By A/B testing ad copy variations featuring different competitive differentiators and more specific language, we increased CTR from 0.45% in January to 0.97% in April and 2.29% by the end of August.

We were also able to impact lead quality by featuring business requirements for loan application acceptance, such as "In Business 3+ Years" in ad headlines. As a result, we reduced the cost spent on irrelevant clicks and improved the quality of leads handled by the call center and underwriters.

This led to 180 new customer leads in August and 45 new customers for the business, a 25% close rate for applicants.

By influencing searchers not to click unless they met application requirements, we also saved money on clicks that never would have converted. By now, we were saving the client money and bringing in far more leads, but we had one more project to complete to get our clients out of a tough spot.

Leveraging the Display Network: In most cases, search ads drive more leads than the display network, which is often used for brand awareness or early-funnel marketing activity. That being said, display ads are much cheaper per click than search ads, so we decided to take advantage of a new AdWords feature called in-market targeting.

This targeting method shows ads to people whose Google searches and web-browsing activity place them "in the market" for small business loans. Unlike traditional display targeting methods, in-market targeting is lead-focused, making it the perfect tactic for the client's challenge. After implementation...

The client's display campaigns began to outperform search campaigns, leading to 312% more clicks in August vs. January, despite increasing spend by only 35%.