PPC Conversion Optimisation

Adwords PPC Conversion Optimisation Case Study- Safari and Beach

Safari and Beach are a leading holiday and hotel specialists with a great range of African safaris, beach holidays and honeymoons on offer to customers in the UK and around the world.

The Problem:

With little time to manage their paid search campaign and with an unoptimised Adwords account spending a large budget each month, Safari and Beach’s director Nick Jenkins was concerned that their campaign contained a number of issues that made it difficult to clearly identify the return on investment – in order to justify the monthly spend. He was right. After an initial PPC campaign review, I explained how the account was suffering from a range of errors: including incorrect usage of keywords match types, illogical bidding and entirely flawed conversion data.

The Solution:

With 3 days of Adwords optimisation campaign work scheduled over the first month and another 3 days spread over the following 3 months, I implemented a full and robust PPC optimisation campaign which resolved the client’s main concerns, tracked conversions correctly, increased clicks and online bookings for a lower budget, and provided vital landing page optimisation recommendations for the company’s website development team. The main tasks included this optimisation work:

Campaign Configuration

• Reconfigure “Safari and Beach” and “Tanzania” campaigns which were set to use enhanced CPC bidding
• Re-budget “Safari Honeymoons” and all country based campaigns that tend to “max out” of their daily budget
• Fix all errors in phrase match keywords that were actually broad match with incorrect speech marks
• Resolve lack of correct goal conversion tracking by testing all forms and importing goals from Google Analytics

Keyword Bidding

• Replace broad match keywords with modified broad match to reduce wasted spend on overly broad keywords
• Re-bid all broad match that had higher bids than the same keywords in phrase match and exact match type
• Add and bid on modified broad match versions of the most searched for misspellings of all location names
• Add new “qualifier keywords” from previous search queries – including: best, quality, luxury, exclusive, book, etc

Negative Keywords

• Add existing ad group level and campaign level negative keywords to the account’s shared library
• Research, list and add all country and city negative keywords for locations the company doesn’t serve
• Analyse and add specific negative keywords for big spending phrases that have bad conversion rates
• Fix all ‘Kenya safari’ phrases which trigger ads from the “Tanzania” campaigns using negative keywords
• Review all search queries and add all negative keywords related to known UK based safari parks and brands

Ad Extensions

• Fix the existing call extensions to display the company phone number which is only live in branded campaigns
• Create sitelink ad extensions for the “blog”, “contact us”, “about us”, “why us” and the “top 10 safaris” pages
• Create sitelink ad extensions for all location landing pages and add sitelink descriptions with call to actions
• Select and add the most suitable location sitelinks for each campaign relating to the destination searched for

Ad Optimisation

• Set all ads to rotate indefinitely rather than allow Google to ‘optimise for clicks’ or ‘optimise for conversions’
• Use SpyFu to monitor competitor ads and test improved ad copy with unique selling points and benefits
• Create 4 “best guess” ads from existing conversion data and add best performing copy from all groups
• Create mobile preferred ad with textual call to actions from the best performing ads in each ad group
• Roll out ongoing monthly ad split-testing in all live campaigns and optimise each ad group every session

Targeting and Bid Adjustments

• Add non UK countries as excluded locations and set to target English language searches only
• Re-work bidding adjustment overall range to improve “actual” bid accuracy (from -50% to -30% )
• Reverse the existing device bid adjustment increase of 10% to -10% for searchers using mobile phones
• Add schedule bid adjustments to proportionally increase bids on conversion peak days and hours

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The Results

The 6 days of work saved £3,500 in first 3 months paying for all campaign work twice over and allowed the budget to be steadily increased from there on. The campaign continues this day with improved click through rates, loswer costs per click, lower cost per conversion and and increased business from the Adwords paid search marketing campaign.

The Conclusion

After accepting that the previous PPC contractor had used clicks on “email us” links rather than actual converted visits to the “thank you” pages as a Key Performance Indicator, Safari and Beach manager Nick was right to have an audit and overhaul on the campaign. By reviewing the first 3 days of data, improved click through rates and reduced budget, we were confident we could slowly increase monthly budget back up to the initial value at a rate that generated as many qualified leads and online bookinks as possible fro the same budget. We got twice as many.

Impressed with the results and armed with advice on improvements to the holiday destination landing pages that would be implemented before the next campaign, Nick said these kind words about my services and results:

The Client Tesimonial

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