46% cost saving in the first month – PPC Management

The recent PPC management one month case study is now over, this was a new pay per click client we took on at the beginning of May so we thought we’d monitor and blog their progress as an example of what happens when an experienced ppc management agency gets their hands on an average ppc account. 

The AdWords account was fairly well structured but needed tightening up on the targeting as well as splitting out to cast a wider net as too many sales were coming in on the main generic keywords. Whilst “too many sales” sounds like it’s a good problem but not when the sales on the main generics convert at a cost per sale of £150-£200 average and the client’s profit margin runs at around this level so we had to focus on reducing the cost per sale on the generic keywords or cutting out these expensive keywords altogether and generating sales at a lower cost per sale.

We worked out a plan of action and started to optimise the AdWords account, keeping in regular touch with the client, this coupled with our ppc management knowledge, skills and procedures resulted in fantastic cost savings and percentage increases over the first month. We enjoyed working on the account and they are great people to work with although at first they were a bit wary of using another PPC agency as they have suffered at the hands of several before. To build trust and show them we knew our ppc management stuff we offered the first month of ppc management  free; We can’t do this for every account, although many do qualify (please ask for details), but this was one that we felt definitely deserved it as they had been messed about by a handful other ppc management agencies and we knew that we could do good work for them from looking at their AdWords account during our initial free ppc audit.

In the two previous blog posts regarding this account we explained that we achieved some great 10 and 21 day results; slashing of irrelevant impressions, boosting of click through rate, increase in quality scores, decrease in cost per click, cost per sale and and the spend overall, but now the full month is up the figures look like this :

A) Clicks, We focussed hard on creating adcopy that extolled the USP’s/benefits of buying from our client and we then used focussed keyword selection and matching options (and negatives where necessary) to further target those searchers with buying intent.

B) Impressions, Impressions were slashed by 57.80% from 143,331 to 60,545. You’ll often hear from some ppc agencies that impressions are like free branding which is kind of true, so it sounds good! after all your brand name is out there and you don’t pay for impressions in ppc marketing… right!? .. wrong!! You might not pay for an impression but in effect you’ll pay a penalty in the form of an increase in the cost per click for having a lower click through ratio. e.g, 1000 impressions yielding 100 clicks give you a 10% click through ratio, but reduce the impressions by half and you double the click through ratio by still only getting the same number of clicks; 500 impressions and 100 clicks is a 20% click through ratio, and you should receive a higher quality score and thus lower cost per click as a result. The trick is to reduce only the irrelevant impressions by showing as much as possible to those searchers in the right stage of the research/buying cycle, so keyword selection and negative keywords are critical here.

C) Click Through Ratio (CTR), How does a 60.40% increase in click through ratio sound? We raised the overall CTR from 6.97% to 11.18%, which doesn’t sound much but it averages the CTR out, many individual click through ratios rocketed which had very positive effects on the AdWords quality score and cost per click and imagine if the competition is still running at around the same previous average!

D) Average Cost Per Click, (CPC) In the final week we managed to reduce the average cost per click down again by a further 3% to a grand one month total of 21.10% so we took it from from 66p a click to 52p per click, every click counts in PPC management and the cheaper we can get them for then the better for the client and a 21.10% reduction is a very nice start.

E) Conversion Rate, The conversion rate for this client isn’t going to be stellar by industry standards as it’s a high ticket leisure sector item that lasts years and so it’s not a necessary purchase and once bought it’s not frequently replaced so even a small increase here is a major win and so far we’ve helped gain a 10.10% increase in conversion rate in the first month and we’ll now be moving on to on site conversion optimisation testing to further increase the conversion rate.

F) Cost Per Conversion/Sale (CPA), Overall we reduced the cost per sale by nearly a third at 28.40% from £82.80 to £59.27 so each sale is now coming in at a saving of around £23.00.

G) Cost, Probably the most impressive percentage rate comes last; we achieved a 46.60% reduction in the AdWords spend in May compared to April, this is a cash figure saving of £3,045.92 after just one month of us doing the ppc management.

We have enjoyed working on the account and saving them over £3,000 in just the first month, but that’s not the end of the story as sales actually shot up too, as the offline sales increased to the point the client said it was the busiest month they can remember. In fact it’s caused a small problem for them as they want to keep the budget capped until they have more capacity to handle the telephone calls so cutting out the very expensive sales and hitting the longer tail, lower volume keywords with really targeted adgroups worked a treat for them and we now look forward to expanding their reach and increasing their conversion ratios over the coming months.

The great news is that in PPC management this saving isn’t a one off saving, it’s going to be there every month moving forward if we keep o top of the account and work proactively the results should get better so the compound effect of the £3,000 saving each month would be £36,000 saved over the next 12 months or £36,000 to gain another 607 sales!

We’d love to show you what we could do with your ppc account so feel free to drop us a line for a no obligation, jargon fee chat and who knows, maybe this time next month you could have shaved 46% of your AdWords spend too!