How we helped a SaaS Company in Vancouver lower their CPA and scale their campaign profitably from $45,000 to $77,000 a month
About the Client
This company provides businesses with a tool for automating Customer Support, Sales, and Marketing conversations on Facebook Messenger and Instagram.
They were already running Google Ads but weren’t happy with their results. They wanted someone to examine their campaign and provide solutions to their high costs per conversion.
Opportunities
1. They were not running a remarketing campaign. The problem with not doing this is they won’t retarget those who haven’t converted yet.
2. They were not utilizing Google Display Network (GDN) campaigns. By not using GDN’s different targeting options, they missed out on a big part of their omnichannel marketing system.
3. They were not taking advantage of the new Google Platform offerings, such as the “Performance Max campaign,” which provides a very cheap cost per acquisition.
Challenges
While auditing their campaigns, aside from having high costs per conversion, we found out that:
1. They wasted a lot of their advertising budget on non-converting keywords.
2. They were running multiple campaigns with overlapping keywords.
3. They used inefficient campaign bidding strategies, such as choosing “Maximize conversion value” while keeping the actual value for each conversion the same. And using Target impression share incorrectly, which only resulted in having to pay Google more money.
4. They were not hitting their conversion goals and had trouble moving their prospects from the consideration stage to the purchase stage.
5. They needed better-written ad copy with consistent messaging across their campaigns.
Services Offered
– Google Search Ads
– Performance Max Campaign
– Google Display Network
– Remarketing Campaign
Result
- In about 3 months, we were able to:
Provide an immediate solution to the high cost per conversion. - Increase the conversion rate of the non-branded campaign by 221%
- Get the conversion rate of the brand campaign up from 7.91% to 8.37%.
- Identify the actual cost of customer acquisition per country.
- Find out which countries delivered the best conversions at the lowest cost possible.
- Lower the branded campaign’s Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) by 259% from $20.57 to $7.95.
- Bring down the CPA of the non-branded campaign by 212% from $80 to $37.78.
- Scale the campaign profitably from $45,000 to $77,000 in ad spend.
Top Solutions
After doing the audit, we agreed to implement the following solutions for each problem:
Problem #1: They wasted a lot of advertising spend on non-converting keywords.
Solutions:
- Test different keywords using different match types.
- Turn off keywords with 3x Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).
- Programmatically set an alert when CPA hits 3x the threshold. In this case, they didn't know they were spending $713 for CPA because they weren't utilizing Google ad scripts to alert them of such problems automatically.
Problem #2: They were running multiple campaigns with overlapping keywords.
Solutions:
- Review the search term report and determine which keywords triggered the ad.
- Run a keyword report to uncover the campaigns and ad groups with overlapping keywords.
- Turn off the other ad groups with high CPC and CPA due to multiple campaign keywords overlapping.
Problem #3: They used incorrect campaign bidding strategies. They were using a very restrictive manual CPC. That is tedious and time-consuming — you always have to be looking at the data and manually adjusting the bids — and it also makes it harder to win in the real-time auction.
Solution:
- For high-budget campaigns, utilize both Google's automated bidding strategy and the target CPA.
Problem #4: They were not hitting their conversion goals and had trouble moving their prospects from the consideration stage to the purchase stage.
Solution:
- Build 3 types of campaigns. One for Awareness. Another for Consideration (for audiences who've already interacted with the brand). And a third one for Retargeting.
Problem #5: They had poorly written ad copy.
Solution:
- Revise the ad copy using what we know are best practices.
- Write the ad copy based on the buyer's journey and the type of campaign.
