Summary: We took over a Google Ads campaign and increased their conversion rate while decreasing their cost per conversion.

A Google Ads campaign can be tricky, and sometimes, when you try to do it yourself, you spend too much money and not get the desired results. When reportit® came to us, they managed their Google Ads account and took Google representatives’ advice. They weren’t getting the leads they wanted and were spending north of $300 per conversion. They asked us to review their campaign and make suggestions. Previously, we redesigned their website so we were familiar with the product.

The Challenge

The biggest challenge we had to overcome was convincing them not to go with the advice of Google representatives. They were telling them to set up all different ad groups and ads. They had over 100 keywords, and most were irrelevant to their business. In 30 days, they lost over $870 on clicks for irrelevant search terms. They weren’t using any extensions which can help with the ad’s performance. The worst part was they were letting Google Ads make changes and updates automatically, which was playing havoc on the campaign.

The Results

We immediately turned off the automatic updates because we didn’t want the machine learning AI to undo our changes. We eliminated over 40 irrelevant keywords, saving them hundreds of dollars per month. When we dug deeper into the search phrases in which their ad appeared, many were close, and if you didn’t understand the product, you would think they were relevant, but they weren’t searches relevant to buying the product. The target market was the company to buy their product, not the product’s user once implemented. As a result, we reset some match types with the remaining keywords to give us more relevant search phrases. Once that was finished, we tweaked their target cost per acquisition until we got a steady stream of form submissions.

When we took over managing the account, their acquisition rate averaged less than 4% week over week. In some weeks, they didn’t have any form submissions, or the form submissions they did have weren’t good. As of this writing, their conversion rate is regularly over 10%, and they have fewer irrelevant form submissions.

Conclusion

It took about three months of continually tweaking the campaign to get it running smoothly. We continually remove search terms that cost money but do not result in a form submission. Currently, they have around 25 relevant keywords that produce acquisitions for them. We also decreased their cost per acquisition to less than $100 and increased their conversion rate, and all this was done without raising their budget. Our client, reportit®, is quite happy with the weekly results, and we have been able to achieve the same results, 10% conversion rate, and less than $100 cost per acquisition, as they increased their budget.