Improving search ad spend ROI by 69%

Snapshot

A tighter, more focused PPC campaign saw a travel company’s cost per lead drop as paid leads nearly doubled.

Our client, a vacation planning agency in business for 30 years had been managing their own Google Ads account. On average, their leads are worth $586.

Since taking over management of their Google Ads account in late 2015, our PPC team has significantly lowered their cost per lead while also expanding the account to increase leads by 90%.

Lowered cost/lead by 41%

The challenge

Business in this industry is highly dependent on seasonality. Their original strategy took seasonality into account, but was not sophisticated enough to take advantage of it.

Also, they were spending too much money on keywords that weren’t converting and had too many broad match keywords that were spending too much of the budget.

The quality of leads was an issue as well, affected negatively by search terms they were bidding on and the broad match strategy.

Our approach

Our team began by cleaning the account, utilizing negative keywords and exact match keywords to optimize the bidding strategy. The keywords that didn’t convert were removed, and the bidding on keywords that did convert was expanded to alike keywords.

The use of negative keywords combined with new ad copy that reflected the types of vacation packages offered vastly improved the client’s lead quality.

Increasing the client’s impression share heightened the brand’s visibility and increased click-through rates for all campaigns.

To take advantage of seasonality, we centered the budget around the peak season while maintaining steady bidding strategies for the year-round campaigns, like those surrounding honeymoon and family vacations.