How we took over a Google ad account and were able to get 25% more leads and reduce the costs by 11% by approaching the ad account the right way
Taking over an existing ad account can be a daunting task. In my experience as a media buyer first, and as a head of delivery after, I have seen lots of situations where improvements could be made right away, but they didn’t bring the desired results.
You think there is a lot of low-hanging fruit there, but performance gets worse. This led us to be very cautious when taking over ad accounts that are already running.
Today I want to speak about this project we have been working on for over a month now. It’s a very specific niche, and the goal is to get qualified leads for the business.
The main KPI to focus on is Cost Per Lead (CPL).
This is the situation in the 14 days before we jumped in:
Total Costs: CHF 2,903.23
CPL: CHF 69.12
Budget is not a variable here, as the client is a big company and we have to work with a fixed amount for the quarter. Therefore we focused only on CPL, trying to bring as many qualified leads as possible with the assigned budget.
We performed an initial campaign analysis, and we identified the following points:
Search Keywords Optimization
Search Terms Optimization
Ads Optimization
Campaign Structure Optimization
Most of the leads were coming from the search campaigns, and it was natural to focus our initial efforts on them. One of the keys to a successful Google search campaign is to create relevant ads (RSA) for the keywords we are targeting.
After optimizing points #1 and #2, we focused on increasing the relevance of the ads to our KWs (Optimization Score). Step #3 completed.
Before jumping into point #4, it’s important highlight that we focused first on what was working, and allocated the remaining budget to the “missing” campaigns (more about this in a second).
This is where the experience I was talking about at the beginning comes into place: don’t let your ideas affect your decisions without analyzing data.
You think you can do better because you did this in other accounts, but this is a risk that you shouldn’t take (unless required by other factors).
It’s a form of respect toward the client’s budget as well.
After optimizing the existing campaigns that were already in place and they were bringing results, we implemented the Dynamic Search campaign (DSA) with a small budget in order to cover potential KWs we weren’t targeting in the classic search campaign together with a PMax.
These were the results of the first 2 weeks of our work
A great start, right? Kudos to Daniel, who is doing an amazing job as usual.
As often happens, in our world things change very quickly, so after this great start we faced a big drop in performance. You know, we are not here just to show how good we are without showing the struggles and the challenges of our work, so we’ll give an update on our website or in another release of Hands ON.
For now, let’s consider today’s takeaway:
Be careful when you approach an existing account. Taking the risk of putting things upside down is hardly ever a good choice. Rather than building new foundations, clean up the current and leverage the work (and the money) already put in place to gather data.
Building on top is easier (and often more effective) than building from scratch.
Until the next time.
Luca
