The Situation
Altor Employment Solicitors are a small business of employment solicitors with offices in Milton Keynes, Bishop’s Stortford and London. They began experimenting with Google Ads in early 2019, and experienced some success albeit at a high cost, and suspected that there was a lot of room for improvement.
During their campaign between April and July 2020, they had the following KPIs:
- Cost Per Click: £10.97
- Cost Per Conversion: £110
- Conversion Rate: 10%
- Return on Ad Spend: 118%
The Challenge
Their current return on ad spend meant that Google Ads was barely worth the investment. This number is also inflated, as it assumes every conversion is worth the same £240, however a large portion of their conversions were poor leads that would never convert.
I needed to not only streamline the campaign, but also increase the quality of leads calling in, to make the campaign as profitable as possible.
Initial Optimisation
Wasted Spend
When conducting an initial audit of the account, I found some quick wins that would instantly save them money.
They were advertising at all times of the day, but their ad schedule report showed that business hours were clearly more profitable than non-business hours. In fact, they spent 50% of their budget on clicks during hours that gave them 10% of their conversions.
Simply restricting the ad spend to business hours allowed that other 50% of their budget to be spent during hours that would give them 9x more conversions than it was currently getting them
Poor Leads
We had a consultation to better help me understand the Employment Law industry, and after consulting the search terms report, it was clear that there were some key words that were attracting the wrong kind of leads.
Words that implied a cheap or free service were our enemy, so after going through all of the search terms we didn’t want to see again, we were able to populate a negative keyword list that refined the phrases our ads appeared for. In the following months, they confirmed that they were no longer being contacted by the wrong kind of lead.
Campaign Management
The main job of course is always to maximise our return on ad spend, and there are a lot of areas to tweak to achieve it.
Keyword research
The daily budget was very small - £25 a day. After extensive keyword research and competitor analysis, I came to the conclusion that it’s better to focus solely on the bottom funnel keywords (keywords that imply the highest intent to convert). This way we can collect a useful quantity of data on the performance of these keywords, rather than spreading it too thinly over a large amount of keywords.
Landing page design
I did not create a custom landing page for Altor, but I did make some edits to their current landing page – listing testimonials at the bottom as well as making their contact form more pronounced
Launching the new campaign
Once I was happy with how the new campaign looked, I launched it as a separate to the old campaign. This way I was able to compare the performance of the previous campaign to the new one.
Optimising the campaign
Campaign optimisation is always a process of analysing all the data available to you, and making profitable decision based on the insights provided. Whenever the data revealed areas for improvement, the campaign would be tweaked where necessary.
The Results
Between August and December 2020 following the launch of the new campaign, these were the following KPIs:
- Cost Per Click: £8.47
- Cost Per Conversion: £53.83
- Conversion Rate: 15.73%
- Return on Ad Spend: 346%
Translated into percentage changes from the previous campaign:
- Cost Per Click: Fell by 23%
- Cost Per Conversion: Fell by 51%
- Conversion Rate: Rose by 57%
- Return on Ad Spend: Rose by 293%