The challenge

Messagemaker Displays wanted to focus more on their core products (VMS – Variable Message Signs and VAS – Vehicle Activated Speed Signs) where they were getting the highest ROI. But they needed to substantially increase the number of quality leads for that side of the business.

There were two main areas of focus to help overcome the shortfall in leads; improve the conversion rate and reduce the poor quality traffic and prioritise the core products to maximise performance and maintain ROI.

The Broadplace approach

It was important to get a good understanding of the market, Messagemaker’s customers and their previous campaigns. Broadplace started by analysing the activity that had been run previously. The search campaign audit, which is a standard of the Broadplace service when a client first joins, helped uncover several things:

• Keywords that were most popular with customers, especially those looking specifically for Messagemaker’s products
• Less relevant Keywords which were a high volume of traffic and substantial cost, but very little conversions.
• Patterns and trends in performance: any seasonality and differences between the products.

Micro-audits and search query reports remained a key element of Broadplace’s optimisation throughout the management of the campaigns.

There were several areas to address; poor performing keywords, volume, and the performance and priority of the core products.

To address the latter, Broadplace restructured the keyword campaigns and allocated the core products in their own campaigns in order to control the spend better and test different bidding strategies to continuously improve the campaigns performance.

The high volume, less relevant generic keywords were removed from the campaigns, and activity was more focused on more productive, product focused search terms.

And lastly, to capture more customer queries, Broadplace redesigned the Dynamic Search Ads campaigns for client’s main products (VAS and VMS) as they both had good quality and relevant content on the product web pages that would trigger more search queries and generate more traffic.

The results

The new campaigns structure helped simplify the management of the accounts on Google and Microsoft. Making decisions on where to allocate budget became easier, ensuring investment was placed where it worked most effectively. The new structure complimented the introduction of smart bidding strategies too.

The refreshed Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) were a great success and substantially helped to increase the number of leads, increasing the total 46% YoY.

Overall, as a result of more proactive keywords management, a re-built structure and DSA improvements the Search campaigns conversion rate increased by over 181% YoY and drove the cost per lead down by 66%.