Adwords Campaign Creation

Adwords Campaign Setup Case Study – Stone Executive

Stone executive are one of the UK’s leading executive and board level recruitment firms. With a history of headhunting and placing top level talent in some of the biggest companies..

The Problem:

With a beautifully designed and nicely functioning website that works well to describe Stone’s services and their reputation, founder and owner David was eager to increase the volume of both clients and potential candidates visiting the site. Having already researched key search markets and having optimised the site pages for their target keywords, the site was enjoying continued growth from Google organic search traffic.

However, aware that competitors paid search results were pushing Stone’s organic listings down the first page of Google, the firm established that they would benefit from taking some of the real estate available at the top of Google’s search results pages.

The Solution:

Having mapped the 25 or so different industries and sectors the company was targeting and established their main target keyword phrases for each, I was able to set up a number of small test campaigns on just the healthcare sector, in order to see which sets of keywords would likely be most profitable.

Our initial paid campaign keyword research indicated strongly that the words “executive search” not only generated visits from potential clients in the research stage of finding a suitable recruitment firm to help fill their vacancies, but also from potential candidates.

Although this attracted visitors from the right industry, these keywords failed to target those who were past the reasearch stage and were ready to engage with a recruitment firm, it also encouraged costly clicks from potential job seekers, which we didn’t want to target.

Instead of targeting phrases like “healthcare executive search” we identified a much better stream of potential clients that were searching for “healthcare headhunters” and other related phrases. As well as discouraging unwanted clicks from candidates wanting to submit their CV with these keywords, we actively blocked them by adding a range of negative kewyords that ensured they would never see our ads.

After the initial test campaign results were conclusive I was able to roll out a similar set of campaigns and Adgroups for the other 25 or so targeted sectors and to ensure we only encouraged the most suitable visitors for our small monthly budget I imposed lots of restraints that ensured we disqualified unwanted clicks and targeted just those decision-makers that were likely to engage with the brand to request their services.

By equipping each highly targeted group with 2 or 3 alternate ads we were able to establish the better performing ad wording buy continually split testing them against each other. And by monitoring cost per clicks on a full set of keyword match types we were able to refine our bids for each keyword phrase. Monitoring the search terms that our keywords were generating clicks from allowed me to further refine our list of negative keywords to improve click through rates and quality score, as can be seen in the image.

The Results

Although our budget was low and we hit our target of paying no more that £1 per click, we had established that just a handful of converting leads would pay for the entire year’s Google advertising budget. With the high price of print and poster advertising in the executive recruitment niche, we were happy that our campaign budget was generating the best bang for our buck and could easily be increased or decreased at a click of a button.

After the initial test campaign was created and we allowed some data to gather, whilst we reviewed the best set of keywords to bid on for our main campaigns, I was able to refine paid search traffic bids and ads over the coming weeks.

This reduced our budget and average cost per click to less than £1 whilst maintaining the desired amount of supplemental paid Google search traffic to the website each month.

We had previously identified that the landing pages were not fully equipped with an easy to use contact form, but despite this, our newly established stream of visitors were able to navigate the site and either call or contact David’s recruitment right away. The strong branding of the site also encouraged previous paid clicks to recall the Stone brand and to google them at a later date to make an enquiry or to search and and select candidates from Stone’s pool of qualified executives.

Our Adwords stats excelled what we had expected in such a competitive market and all parties were pleased to see that within 3 months we had gained very high click through rates and the maximum possible quality score on the majority of our campaigns.

The Client Tesimonial

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