How We Sent 752 Leads To A Used Car Dealer In 90 Days With PPC
In this study, we’ll show you how we took a failing Google Ads campaign and transformed it into a tremendous success.
The fact is, we generated 752 leads in the very first 90 days of their campaign!
Here’s what we did to accomplish this:
Background
Our client sells previously-owned cars in Burien, WA.
Our objective was to generate brand-new leads and have the sales team have the ability to follow up with the potential customer while they’re browsing the inventory, online.
Before they implemented our PPC service, they had actually spent more than $70,000 in paid ads over 6 years.
Additionally, they spent 10s of thousands with prior agencies that, from what our client told us, “truly didn’t move the needle much.”
So just how did we turn this campaign around?
Let’s simplify!
Revealing A Big Tracking Issue
If you want to know if a project is performing, you need to have accurate monitoring.
The first problem we experienced when auditing this account was that the tracking was not set up correctly.
We noticed that the tracking was reporting tens of thousands of leads, so that looked off.
When we dug deeper, we learned that this account was counting a lead each time somebody hit a general page on their site– not a “thank you” or “confirmation” page, but a general web page on their site.
This led to the campaign reporting countless “leads” that didn’t really exist!
We wiped out any kind of irrelevant conversion actions that skewed the data and started over with brand-new conversion tracking.
Our conversion “goal” was put on the “thank-you page” after a lead fills out a form, so we know that we really accumulated the info from the lead.
Starting Fresh With New Search Campaigns
In our campaign research process, we collaborate with the client to determine what are the driving factors of their organization and what they wish to target.
As soon as we pick a theme, we’ll do a competitive study to determine what angles are being used by competitors, what the offer ought to be, etc. In this case, our client chose to target a general target market who were looking for previously-owned vehicles in their area.
Considering that the previous campaign’s information was manipulated, we started fresh with two all-new campaigns.
The initial campaign was themed around “Used Cars,” and the other campaign was a brand-centric campaign.
We wrote high-converting ad copy and combined them with tight ad groups. We make sure we’re using a “message match” to get the highest CTRs!
Then we used location-targeting to define that the ads were only being offered to their area.
Setting Up High-Converting Landing Pages
Previously, the account was driving traffic to its website homepage.
This is typically not optimal for lead generation projects because homepages are usually not built for conversions.
Instead, we wanted to send traffic to very specific landing pages that matched exactly what people searched for and were optimized to convert extremely.
In this instance, we built a landing page based around used vehicles. We saw that the competition sent the traffic to the inventory pages because people want to know the inventory, so this became our offer.
This landing page gathers the lead’s information and supplies to “view” the inventory.
This way, we collect the information up front, and the client’s sales team can follow up.
The Results
After setting up appropriate tracking, developing brand-new campaigns, writing new ad copy, and developing custom landing web pages, we switched on the web traffic …
… and the leads began gathering!
In fact, within 90 days, we had actually already generated over 700+ leads!
That is not including over 1,033 website visits to (not to the landing page) and additionally 84 actions taken for directions.
As we optimize this existing campaign, we have plans to broaden to other car type-specific landing pages (used trucks, used SUVs, etc.).
Final thoughts
With the appropriate approach, you can take a failing campaign and transform much as we did for this car dealership.
