AdWords Case Study

Background:

An industrial client (name withheld to protect data) had been internally managing an AdWords pay-per-click advertising account for over a year. They were early adopters of the AdWords program in their industry and had experienced success with their advertising.

Challenge:

Their competition began advertising on AdWords in increasing volume, and our client began experiencing lower ad positions and higher competition for key search phrases. Their account was becoming far more expensive and returning less on their investment.

You can see from the following graph that, prior to our management, the number of impressions was high and the number of clicks very low. Lots of people were seeing the ads, but few people were clicking on them. The blue line represents the number of impressions (or views of the ads). The red line represents clicks on those ads.

Solution:

BoxCrush rebuilt the customer's AdWords campaign from the ground up. The account was split into meaningful campaigns that targeted specific demographics. Ad Groups were built within each campaign. And targeted ads were written for specific audiences within each group.

Measuring Success The Adwords Way

In the past three years, we have continued to manage the account and continued to provide value. We still work to refine and target the client’s AdWords goals. In AdWords, there are several metrics by which to measure a campaign’s success.

Ad Position - An ad’s location on the page. To be on the first page of the Google Search results, an ad must be in positions 1-8.

CTR - An ad’s clickthrough rate, or the number of times an ad is clicked on in relation to the number of times that ad is shown (remember, those are called impressions).

CPC - CPC is short for cost per click, which is the actual cost a business incurs each time a user clicks on an ad. Google rewards well-written ads that are clicked on a lot, regardless of the budget of the advertiser. The better the CTR, the lower the CPC price becomes.

For this case study, we'll compare our first month of managing the client’s campaign with the same period of time three years later (mid March – mid April).

We were able to better target the ads to a more-relevant audience, which actually lowered the number of times our ads were being seen. Even with 11% fewer impressions, the AdWords campaign has resulted in 20% more clicks and 49% more site visits, at a CPC which is 36% lower than it was when BoxCrush started managing this account.

Managing Cost, One Click At A Time

One common misconception is that Google AdWords is prohibitively expensive. Each industry has its own definition of expensive, but Google AdWords is unique in that the bids for keywords are set by those doing the bidding. Keywords that do not have a lot of competition can have a CPC of less than $0.20. Very popular keywords in some industries are more expensive, but good campaign management can help control costs.

As in the case of this industrial client, the CPC will drop as the CTR rate improves. Google rewards targeted, relevant ads that have a good CTR with a lower CPC price.

In this graphic, the blue line is the average CPC, and the red line is the number of clicks for this particular client. The more clicks an AdWords campaign gets, the lower the CPC becomes. The lower the CPC, the more clicks a client is able to get each day with its daily set budget.

Dan Finney, the CEO of BoxCrush, says,