This is a tale of a client looking to optimize their PPC brand campaign. They knew showing PPC ads for branded terms was valuable to their business (if you’re wondering what that value is check out my colleague, Harris Neifield’s, blog that answers that very question) but they were having a hard time digesting the increasing CPA. That’s where SEER comes in.
What did we discover?
We took a deep dive into our search query reports and noticed a lot of the branded campaign traffic was stemming from users looking to login to their existing account or looking to register for an existing event. The goal of our PPC campaigns is to acquire new customers so this traffic is not a priority for us.
We’ve continuously stayed on top of search queries and negating events as they were created but with new events popping up daily it was proving to be an impossible feat and that traffic was trickling through regardless.
What did we do?
SEER decided it was time to leverage Google’s advanced features. We already had audiences set up and were utilizing them for remarketing campaigns so why weren’t we leveraging that same ideology for search? That being said we implemented a Remarketing List for Search Ads (RLSA) test in our brand campaign to exclude any site visitor that had already converted or visited the login page.
What we found:
Comparing performance since implementing this test (6 weeks prior vs. post) we’ve seen weekly average conversions increase 71% while weekly avg. CPA has decreased 31%! And that’s not all. We also saw branded click-through rates increased 35%, clicks increase 27% and avg. CPCs decrease 5%.
Key Takeaways:
Even though we were never limited by budget, we can conclude that more impressions are being served to the right audience (new users who have never converted) which is increasing clicks, improving our click-through rate and increasing conversions.
If you have client focused on acquiring new customers we’d recommend testing RLSA in your brand campaign to exclude current customers who are probably using Google search to find your website vs. typing in the URL (let’s face it, we’ve all done this). Test it out and let us know what you find!
