tl;dr I took an AdWords Express account from a 0.0006% conversion rate to a 29.31% conversion rate. The conversion goal was a phone call. In this case study I share how I did it.
AdWords Case Study Before & After Shots
I had a lot of fun working on this account, it’s an idea I’ve been dying to implement for a longtime. The account began as an AdWords Express account so the bar for improvement was set really low. I actually saw it just laying on the ground. WARNING: Fellow AdWords managers, the image you are about to view is NSFL. Here’s the before picture:
That’s a 0.7% CTR and a 0.0006% conversion rate. Doing it himself got him 1 phone call but if he came to me first we would have gotten him 465 calls with the same budget.
I’m sorry you had to see that. If you couldn’t read the caption through your tears, that’s a 0.7% click-thru-rate (CTR) and a 0.0006% conversion rate. If it isn’t obvious, using AdWords Express is a very bad idea.
So what does the account look like now with Paul’s magic touch? Here’s the after picture:
That’s a 3.55% CTR and a 29.31% conversion rate. That’s not a branded campaign either—this client didn’t even have a website!
Since taking over the account and building my own campaign, the conversion rate has skyrocketed to an unbelievable 29.31% with an average ad position of 2 (right near the top of the page) and the calls now cost $6.70 each instead of $3,115.96.
Going from the original 0.0006% conversion rate to the 29.31% conversion rates is a 4,884,900% improvement.
How I Made the Taxi Cab AdWords Account Reach a 29% Conversion Rate
Taxi Cabs are unique because with smart phones, a lot of the drivers are hired after being searched on a mobile device. I really took advantage of this development with this AdWords build.
The first thing I did was eliminate the desktop and tablet advertising to target only mobile phones with ads.
Second, there’s little value added when you go to a taxi cab website when you’re trying to call a cab. What would you go there for? The phone number. I cut out that step by using the tap to call ad extension and disallowing users from going to the site (which was just the client’s Google+ page anyways because he didn’t have an actual website)! Google+... AdWords... Geez, this case study is old, haha.
To recap, the taxi cab ads are only displayed on mobile phones and the only way the advertising budget is spent is when someone taps the tap to call button (which populates their phone with the phone number). At this point, all the user has to do is send the call through, which just under 30% of users do.
I also invested some time in nailing the fundamentals (I think a lot of managers are forced to cut corners here, especially if their agency limits the hours they can work on an account) by building really tight ad groups, only using exact match keywords, and writing killer ad copy—like the time I wrote a sentence worth $455,000.
Featured Photo by Leo Cardelli from Pexels
