Sustained 70%+ Growth in Leads Over Three Years For Luxury Sprinter Van Company

Snapshot

In the first 3 years of managing their ads, we generated 13,435 leads at an 85% lower cost-per-conversion.

Our client ​​is one of the nation’s largest distributors of luxury lifestyle Mercedes-Benz Sprinters selling vehicles that can cost upwards of $200,000. In the initial meetings with the client, they didn’t believe we’d be able to get the cost per conversion below $120 in their market, which we were able to do within the first month.

Three years after taking over managing the account, our team went way beyond their best expectations of success:

• An Average of 700 leads per month, up from 43
• $48.85 Cost/Conversion, an 85% reduction from $324 

The Challenge – Reduce Cost/Conversion by 60%

Before coming to us in October 2019, our client managed their Pay Per Click advertising in-house. While it was their main channel for getting quote requests, they were concerned about their Google Ads campaign’s lead volume and cost efficiency. Once we were brought into the picture, we were challenged with the “impossible” task of bringing their $324.02 cost/conversion down to $120.

• By the end of our 1st month, we had brought their cost/per conversion down to $110 
• One year later it was $67

Our Approach

Their biggest obstacle to achieving the objective was their quality scores were very low and their costs-per-click were high because their main competitor was Mercedes-Benz itself. 

We chose to work on fine-tuning their quality scores as our main lever to bring the costs-per-clicks down and get more traffic for their budget.

We achieved this by doing three main things:

1. Adopting a SKAG (Single Keyword Ad Group) strategy across the board to tighten control over queries and ad copy, as well as revamping their ad extensions (now called ad assets) to maximize their click-through rates.
2. Splitting campaigns up by search intent to have better control of our budget.
3. Gathering conversion data to prepare for smart bidding, which was relatively new at the time.

In our day-to-day management of the account, we ran A/B tests of the ad copy, and monitored their search terms religiously to find new negative keywords to add.

This strategy delivered consistent results until 2021 when Google removed the modified broad match keyword match type – one of the biggest changes to their platform in recent years. We quickly pivoted our approach to continue year-over-year growth.

Challenge #2 – Sustain 70% YoY While Adapting To Changes In Keyword Matching

The 2021 sunsetting of the broad match modifier keyword match type prompted advertisers across all industries to redesign their Google Ads strategies. In our case, it rendered the SKAG approach obsolete, so we had the objective of flipping our strategy on its head while sustaining the pace of our 70%+ year-over-year growth.

By November 2022, our conversions grew by 113.76% and our cost/conversion went down by 19.32%

Our Approach

By this point, we had 2 key levers to pull:

1. Almost 2 years of rich conversion data to power our smart bidding strategies.
2. A much-deepened understanding of who our top buyers are.

Knowing this, we developed a strategy to cover all areas of our buying funnel, leveraging broad match, smart bidding, audience segments and ad copy that’s tailored to buyer intent (Awareness, Consideration, Decision).

Aside from this, we continued with our regular practice of A/B Testing and negative keywording but brought it to a higher level. Going beyond excluding irrelevant terms and conducting N-Gram analyses based on years of search term data to maximize keyword performance.

Pilot Digital Marketing has been an invaluable resource for our company. It’s cliche to say that they are more than a vendor but the entire crew at Pilot is invested in OUR success … Through their advice and guidance, we’ve grown to exceptional heights.

Jeff Zaffron, CMO

Beyond The Numbers

Our partnership has been incredibly successful. Our $41 cost/conversion is just over a third of their $120 cost/conversion goal they deemed impossible when they came in. From November 2021 to November 2022, we’ve had a 153,745.49% increase in leads compared to our first year. This is all thanks to our focus on kaizen: constant improvement. We went beyond our goals in the first month and could’ve left it there, but we didn’t, because that’s not who we are, we want all of our clients to reach their full potential.