Moving Company Success Story: 163.2% Increase in Conversion Rate

Overview & What We Did

Horizon Movers & Storage came to us as an existing Google Ads advertiser who was looking to improve the results of their Google Ads campaigns and drive more leads to their business.

We immediately got to working by improving a couple of key aspects of their ad account.

Landing Page

The advertiser was sending traffic to the homepage of the website, rather than a dedicated PPC landing page.

With a landing page we have full control over what a user sees based on the intent and location of their search and are better able to match the user’s intent compared to a general website page.

We built two custom landing pages and segmented the traffic to each page by service type.

Ad Networks

The advertiser was running both search and smart search ad campaigns.

Smart campaigns are a great choice for businesses who want to run ads without having to manage them. However, smart campaigns have only a fraction of the features and less data than search campaigns.

This leads to smart campaigns not performing as well as managed search campaigns.

We rebuilt the ad account only using search campaigns.

Keywords

Over time the ad account had been adding additional keywords into the account based on Google’s automated recommendations.

Unfortunately, not all of these keywords (combined with their match type) were quality keywords, which was leading to the account spending money on low quality clicks.

While rebuilding the search campaigns, we audited the keywords and removed any low-quality keywords from the new campaigns.

Ad Relevance

One of the things that can easily drive up your cost per click is a low ad relevance score. This is caused by your ads not matching what the user was searching for.

The way the account was structured was that a single ad group targeted searches for multiple services. Meaning, a user could search for service A and see an ad promoting service B.

Not only can this lead to lower conversion rates by a user clicking on an irrelevant ad, but can also drive up cost per click and limit your impression share.

While creating the new campaigns, we segmented the ad groups by topic to ensure that the user would always see a relevant ad.

Keyword Match Types

Google Ads has 4 primary match types. Broad, Broad Match Modified (BMM), Phrase, and Exact match.

The account was primarily using phrase match keywords and was attempting to use a 5th match type called Phrase Modified Match (PMM).

Only using phrase matches was restricting the ad account and not allowing bids to be as granular as they could be. While rebuilding the campaigns, we used a combination of BMM, phrase, and exact match keywords where appropriate.

PMM keywords are incredibly rare to see, and in our opinion have very few use cases. However, the syntax to use PMM was implemented incorrectly. This more than likely confused Google which is why any PMM keywords in the account had little to no historical impressions and were removed from the new build.

Results

Within 30-days, we were able to see large improvements to the performance of the ad account due to the changes we made.

The majority of the early increases are likely due to the landing page as that was the most significant change made to the account.

Other metrics such as clicks, CTR, and cost per click all saw decreases in performance. These will likely improve and we continue to optimize the account, but goes to show that you need to focus on what matters the most (conversions/sales) rather than metrics when optimizing your account.