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Brief
RF Training provides courses for people wanting to become qualified in trades such as plumbing, electrician, and locksmiths. They have two training centres in Birmingham and Manchester.
The company has 4 websites. The oldest website www.RFTraining.co.uk has the best organic traffic but has higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates. The newest website www.trainingandcareers.co.uk has the lowest bounce rate and highest conversion rates but has little or no organic search traffic.
Pay per click is an effective technique for generating enquiries but it is very competitive. With so many companies bidding on the same phrases, the cost per click is often £1-3 for top 5 positions. The sign-up rate is 5-10%, so the cost per acquisition can be over £20.
Strategy
The AdWords account had been poorly managed with a number of significant problems:
- ad spend appeared to have been inflated by deliberately bidding for top 2 positions (which was resulting in very high cost per click of >£2.50).
- the conversion tracking was not set-up – so it was not possible to determine if any of the phrases were not performing
- the account was targeting the whole of the UK, even though leads outside of the midlands and the north were significantly less likely to convert into a sale
- campaigns contained a mix of search and content network
- the daily budget had been limited and the ads were not being seen for 50-75% of the day
- there was little or no ongoing optimisation
Anicca Digital Solutions were asked to restructure and manage the campaign in order to try and achieve the target CPA of <£15 and a minimum of 1000 leads per month.
Execution
On taking over the account the following improvements were made:
Structure and set-up
- Addition of conversion tracking (linked Goals)
- New more complex campaign structure with detailed ad groups to improve relevance and quality score
- Better use of geo-targeting, as the courses were held in Birmingham and Manchester the targeting was limited to a 100 mile radius of these locations.
- Stopping the content network and taking into consideration the much lower CTR’s in the search network (eg when pruning phrases for low CTR’s)
- Addition of long-tail keyphrases and use of all match types
- Paused generic and added negatives; as the broad match phrases were resulting in ads being displayed for unrelated trades such as welding
- Increased budgets
- Changed landing page to the most effective of the 4 websites owned by the company
Ongoing management and optimisation
- Reduce maximum bids in order to target lower positions (resulting in a drop in CPC of £1.30-£1.50)
- Good understanding of the importance of click through rate and quality score – this resulted in pruning phrase with low click through rate (CTR)
- Ongoing pruning of keyphrases and ads that were not converting
- Monthly reporting including provision of an online reporting system that the client could access themselves
Integrated approach
- Use of Analytics data to understand user behaviour
- Use of PPC data for developing ongoing landing page strategy and integrated SEO strategy
- Use of Facebook (with Yahoo and MSN to follow)
Results
Timelines of taking over the account
- Account taken over on the 8th March – initial changes to reduce bids, pause content network and change geo-targeting
- New restructured campaigns went live 14-15th March
- Destination urls changed from www.RFTraining.co.uk to www.trainingandcareers.co.uk on 17th March
- Conversions recorded from 21st March (linked from Analytics goals)
Cost per click
We were able to see an immediate drop in cost per click from £2.75 to £1.40 within 24 hours of taking over the campaign. This was due to
- setting the max bid to aim for positions 4-7
- improving the quality score (by restructuring the campaigns and ad groups to improve relevancy).
Volume of traffic and cost (clicks vs costs)
On taking over the account the amount of traffic remained the same (250-300 clicks per day) from the existing campaigns, but the daily cost nearly halved (£675-£775 down to £300-£450).
Once the new campaigns went live and the budgets increased this resulted in a significant increase in traffic 450-650 clicks per day (during the week) and a cost of £650-£900.
Click through rate (CTR)
The previous PPC structure had all 3 networks within the same campaign. The search network had very low CTR’s, although this does not influence quality score it does make it more difficult to decide which phrases and ads are not performing well in Google and should be pruned.
By pausing the content network and any keyphrases with a low CTR this resulted in an immediate increase in % CTR.
Cost per conversion and conversion rate
Prior to the introduction of the conversion tracking it was not possible to calculate the PPC conversions rates. However RF Training had monitored the total conversions from the website (including approximately 10% from non-PPC traffic). It was then possible to compare this to the cost of the PPC campaign. This table shows the comparative conversion rates before and after the restructuring.
Once the PPC conversion tracking was fully implemented the PPC conversion rate was found to be ~7.7% or £18.54 (for the first half of April). In the second half of April the scope of the campaign was increased to target the whole of the UK and the addition of the content network. Although the conversion rate dropped to 5% the overall number of conversion increased significantly.
Facebook
An initial trial has been carried using Facebook to target 18-45 males within 50 miles of Birmingham and Manchester. Two ads were created for each targeting plumbing and electrician courses with a corresponding image and text. The results showed a CTR of 0.02 % and a CPC of £0.42, approximately a third of the CPC of Google.
Conversion tracking has only just become available in Facebook, so we added URL tracking for Analytics, and then produced a custom segment for Facebook traffic. The conversion rate was approximately 1% significantly lower than Google.
What’s next?
- Conversion rates will be improved by pruning of the poorer phrases
- MSN and Yahoo
- Use of PPC results to determine keyphrase strategy for optimisation of the websites
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