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CABLE MANAGEMENT STORE PPC

Increases Leads By 435% By Implementing Our 360 Campaign

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    Read time: 12 mins

    In this case study we are going to demonstrate how we took a stagnant google ads campaign that was barely breaking even and transformed it into a sales generating system.

    In fact, we were able to increase the percentage of conversion for this campaign by 435% in the first few months and steadily maintained its growth in the months following.

    Here’s what we did.

    Background

    Cableaway is an E-comm cable and data management store that is based in Sydney, Australia which has been in operation for over 10 years.

    Our goal was to help generate new leads and sales, using a digital campaign to directly inject cash flow into the business.

    Before coming on board with Marketing Lab, Cableaway were generating approximately 30 sales per month. This figure was deemed to be the average amount of sales the client observed on a monthly basis.

    This Adwords account had spent thousands of dollars, however the client stated that they could not find a way to generate more sales from their online campaigns or improve on what they currently had.

    So how did we manage to turn this campaign around? Let’s break down the objectives and the steps we took to overcome the challenges that Cableaway was facing.


    Objectives

    • Advertise a large inventory of products to a niche market without exceeding the current marketing budget
    • Generate a higher rate of online sales to help inject a greater cash flow into the business
    • Generate brand awareness to a niche market and dominate the competition
    • Scale and grow the digitial strategy to increase the performance of each active campaign
    • Create an omni channel marketing experience to help increase interactions and improve market share and positioning of the business

    Uncovering the Correct Campaign Objective

    We did mention that Cableaway is an ecommerce-built website.. right?

    Being an E-comm site, Cableaway is heavily focused on their product range and when we logged into their AdWords account we were not met with campaigns that would mirror this focus.

    The first problem we encountered was that their pay per click campaigns were structured around search ads only.
    (See screenshot below)

    Now just to get this clear we are not implying that search ads aren’t great, because they most certainly are but in this case, it was probably the main cause as to why the campaigns were only seeing 30 conversions per month.

    We boiled this down to a few reasons.

    1. The competition was also using this method, putting the client in a direct bidding war which raised the cost per click prices
    2. Covering a big product range using search ads requires a large budget as the amount of spend needed on each keyword needs to be generous.
    3. Communicating the products look and feel to a customer through a search ad is quite complicated as there is no visual element to help demonstrate this.
    4. Creating and managing individual ads for each product often becomes a time consuming and expensive task.

    So with the limitations of being identified as to why we should not use a search campaign we focused our efforts elsewhere.

    How could we create a campaign that was product driven and overcome some of the restrictions that Cableaway was experiencing from their search campaigns?

    .We thought to use Google’s Shopping campaigns. For those who don’t know to much about Google shopping, it’s those little picture ads that you are met with on the right hand side of a google search result or directly underneath the search bar itself.

    Google shopping campaigns are insane, when it comes to driving good qualified traffic. This lies in the ad format itself. Shopping ads are reliant on three major things

    1. Image

    What better way for us to demonstrate the build quality and design of our Cable management products than to differentiate ourselves using a product image directly in our ads. Viewing the product before purchase plays a major roll in the buying process there is no better way to help us generate click throughs than advertising the product image itself.

    2. Price

    Displaying the price directly underneath each of our product ads gives Cableaway the ability to stay competitive with competition.

    3. Shipping

    Giving prospects an indication on the cost to have the product shipped directly to them, provides them with all the information they need to make an accurate decision on whether their interest in product is suitable for them.

    These three factors would give our advertising the upper hand to generate a higher click through rate of prospects who are highly interested in purchasing from Cableaway’s online store. The other added benefit of a Google shopping campaign is the overall control and management it provides for advertising larger inventories. It uses direct feeds to populate information about each product directly from your site.

    ‘We now had a campaign that was product focused, running at a cheaper rate than previously, which was giving us the edge to stand out from our competition when advertising in this space.

    How did this impact the performance of Cableaway’s PPC campaigns 

    With more traffic being generated to the website our ad positioning and ranking on Google’s search engine began to increase heavily. We dominated the shopping results within Google for the main product categories eg; Floor Outlet Boxes.

    Google’s Shopping Platform Increased Our Conversion Rate By 181.58% In One Month

    From this campaign alone our conversions soared to an all time high. We jumped from a stagnant 30 conversions per month to a massive 107 the following. The best part was that we didn’t increase Cableaway’s marketing expenses in anyway.

    This meant that we were injecting more cash flow into the business with the same amount of marketing budget giving us a higher return on investment. So now that we had seen what Google shopping could do for this business type it was time to squeeze every little cent we could out of our monthly advertising budget.

    Maximising Our Budget To Squeeze The Most Out Of Our
    Shopping Campaign

    The Average shopping cost per click (CPC) across all industries
    is $0.66 for Google Ads and $0.46 for Bing Ads

    The average cost per click in Google Ads is between $1 and $2
    on the search network.

    As you can see from the reports above, this simple change in ad technique, was allowing the client to pay three times less for a visitor to come to their site. Generating more impressions and more traffic increased the number of sales which included additional benefits as a result, here are some listed below.

    1. Generating more data through the account gave our campaigns a higher level of intelligence
    2. Cableaway became market leaders as their online presence grew with our niche market stratagies

    At this point everything seemed to be working in our favour. The success achieved by adopting a Google shopping campaign allowed us to focus our efforts on what we believed to be the next stage at improving the performance of our campaigns… User Behaviour

    We had two types of traffic running into the site

    1. Traffic that converted into a sale
    2. Traffic that didn’t convert into a sale

    We split these two traffic types to determine a percentage of the overall traffic Cableaway’s site was receiving. The converting traffic was sitting around the 7% – 10% mark. This meant that we had over 90% of people that were interested in one or more of the products but leaving the site empty handed.

    So we asked ourselves. Instead of focusing the budget and strategy on generating new traffic and relying on the first visit sale, when we could market to the 90% of interested visitors and hopefully make a sale on the second or third interaction.

    So that’s exactly what we did.

    Focusing on Those Who Left Our Site Empty Handed

    So now that we had split our traffic into two, with our main focus being on returning prospects. We wanted to know how we could incentivise them to come back?

    Serving them the same old banner or offer simply doesn’t cut it. We needed to have a level of personalisation within our advertising, to give people the impression we knew them on a deeper level. Being able to do this with a large product range was going to be quite the challenge, but Google did have a solution for us.

    Google’s powerful A.I remarketing tool gave us the capabilities we needed to offer a unique remarketing experience to customers based on the interactions they had with our site. For example, if a customer looked at data cabinets in three different sizes then Google’s intelligence system would use this data to build a unique remarketing campaign consisting of those cabinets and similar styles of products only and show it to that particular prospect.

    This type of remarketing is so powerful with the use of this feature. It tailors both cross selling and remarketing within the one ad format.

    The level of personalisation experienced by our users was second to none and because of this we started to see the performance of our campaigns improve once again.

    Hyper Personalised Remarketing Blows The Doors Off Our Conversion Numbers 

    Hyper personalised remarketing campaigns proved to be the key when convincing prospects to purchase from us with either the second or third interaction they had with the business. Our conversion number jumped once again from 107 observed in the previous month, to a whopping 258 the next. (see screenshot below)

    We had doubled our conversions but but yet again we hadn’t increased the current marketing budget. The trick is here is that there is huge difference in cost that retargeting provides. As your remarketing list is not deemed to be ‘new traffic’ Google drops the cost when serving that audience new content.

    So it makes perfect sense to go after a pool of interested prospects for half the cost in comparison to what it would have cost if we had advertised to a new audience.

    The Opportunity That Lazy Competition Provides For Pro Active Businesses Like Cableaway 

    The best part about having lazy competitors is the opportunity that presents itself. In Cableaway’s case it was a game changer. By completing the appropriate background checks into our direct competitors we noticed that they were leaving some doors wide open for us.

    What we mean by this is that they were not bidding on their brand name or branded products. If our competitors were going to be lazy to serve these searches then we wanted to be the ones that showed up and thats exactly what we did. We picked 5 of our most direct competitors who were labeled to be ‘lazy’ in their digital strategy and capitalised on this. Every time one of their so called ‘prospects’ would do a search we would filter them in to our site through an ad.

    The competitor’s ads drive anywhere from 10 to 40 conversions per month. These are direct sales that our competitors were too lazy to do anything about.


    Dynamic Search Ads – Using Machine Learning In Our Search Ads

    Remember at the start of this case study we discussed the restrictions that the search ads were causing us? Well we thought we would revisit this method and apply new means to it. Instead of relying solely on a search campaign we thought that we would use it as a safety net for all of the unique and quirky searches that customers might have surrounding our product range.

    So we turned to the use of Dynamic Search ads. Now these ads are a little different as they are powered by artificial intelligence to help generate the headline associated with the ad. So for example if a customer was typing into the search bar “600 x 800 Black Wall Data Cabinet” our ad would show by generating the exact same headline. This type of personalisation in our search ads gave us the edge when placing our ads side by side with a competitors.

    Our dynamic search campaigns and competitor campaigns began to see a great response with over 100 conversions per month.

    Search Campaigns – Giving Us More Real Estate on Google Search

    So with the set up and execution of our Dynamic Search ads campaign we now had three digital campaigns working side by side serving our audience hyper personalised content to drive them into purchasing from our customer’s site.

    What we stumbled across from doing a search of Floor Outlet Boxes was quite amazing from Cableaway’s point of view. You will notice that we occupy three different areas of prime real estate on the first page. We really don’t give customers a chance to go anywhere else, and if they do they will be kindly met with our competitor campaign.

    Screenshot taken from first page of Google


    Conclusion

    As you can see from what we have shared with you above Cableaway has now trasnformed the way it operates online. Each unique digital stratergy implemented played a vital role in helping Cableaway generate leads and sales online. When we took over management of this account it was generating just over 30 leads per month. With the implementation of our 360 campaign we now have a complete digital strategy made up of seperate campaigns that work in unison, generating over 600 leads and sales per month, without even increasing the budget.

    Stay in the loop

    Marketing Lab Blog is updated weekly with fresh new material, to help your business stay ahead of the curve.