Client Overview

The team needed to see a greater volume of conversions without increasing investment in Google Ads. There were a couple of key blockers:

1. High impression and traffic keywords driving few conversions: With over 1K keywords active, the majority drove a lot of cheap traffic to the site, but converted at a very low rate.
2. Over-segmented campaign structure: With such a large number of keywords, the structure of the account was naturally segmented into redundant ad groups, limiting the capabilities of the Google algorithm to appropriately aggregate data and optimize for conversions.

Recognizing that increasing ad spend quickly under the current campaign would not result in efficient growth, Directive analyzed historical performance from the previous six months to put together a more strategic campaign structure and keyword plan.

We bucketed keywords into groups to first determine which to keep, and which to cut:

• Opportunity drivers
• MQL drivers, at an acceptable cost
• MQL drivers, at an unacceptable cost
• Non-MQL drivers
• Cost < $100, Clicks > 0

The “keepers” were those that fell into the “Opportunity drivers”, “MQL drivers, at an acceptable cost”, and “Cost < $100, Clicks > 0”. Everything else was cut from the campaign plan.

Once we had the list of keywords to keep, we combed through one by one to segment into campaigns, ultimately reducing the number of campaigns from 7 to 4.

• Once we had the campaigns set, we split them into ad groups, segmenting only when necessary to customize the ad copy for each set of keywords.

Lastly, we put together a projected impact of the changes made, to confirm the value of our new structure and predict how spend, traffic, and conversions would be impacted with the change.

Our updated campaign strategy yielded impressive results across multiple key performance indicators when comparing period over period:

• +10% Ad Spend
• +39% MQLs
• +17% Click > MQL CVR
• -21% Cost per MQL
• +19% Clicks
• +26% Opportunities*
• -13% Cost per Opportunity

*additional opportunities are expected to convert, due to the longer conversion window

By consolidating the account structure, we can provide the Google automated bidding algorithm with the best possible signals to drive scalable results.

Focusing ad spend on top-performing keywords, while typically more expensive and competitive than upper-funnel terms, pays dividends in MQLs and Opportunities, and is ultimately more cost-effective than bidding on cheaper terms.