Situation Overview
A well established pest control company, with offices in seven distinct geographic locations, came to us with a common problem. “Google Ads are way too expensive lately.” They’ve been advertising with Google Ads for years, but lately, the leads were getting more and more expensive, to the point where they felt like it might not be profitable to continue with Google Ads.
We started with an audit of their existing campaigns and found many common errors to fix and areas for improvement. In this case study we will look at year over year performance of the campaigns and the agency running them. We’ll compare the campaign and agency performance based on three main categories.
- Strategy and planning.
- Execution and optimization.
- Key Performance Indicators
Account Review and Agency Performance
Strategy and planning
The previous agency used a reasonably good structure for the times, but missed several key opportunities. The vast majority of the traffic came from broad match keywords. This allowed customers who were searching for a specific competitor to click the ads. We found these clicks to have a lower conversion rate on the site, and even worse performance, compared to generic pest control queries, once the agent connected to the customer.
We planned to block competitor traffic from the primary non branded search campaign, but test a “conquesting” campaign to specifically target those customers and attempt to convince them to buy from us instead. We also added an extensive list of exact and phrase match keywords. This allowed us to drive more traffic from historically high converting queries.
Execution and Optimization
We convinced the client team to aggregate their locations into the same campaign. This helped reduce cost per click substantially. We also categorized the keyword traffic into Brand, Generic, and Conquest categories. This gave us a much better read on performance by category and allowed us to deploy budget accordingly. We also moved to manual cost per click bidding, then target cost per lead bidding after sufficient conversion data had been generated. This was a key factor in the moves we see in the key performance indicators. We also set up and did extensive troubleshooting on the conversion tracking to ensure that leads via phone call and form fill were accurately tracked and reported to Google Ads for bid optimization.
Key Performance Indicators – Year over Year comparison Q4 2022 vs 2021
| Agency | Clicks | Cost | Leads | Cost per Click | Cost per Lead |
| The other guys | 1,246 | $21,705 | 251 | $17.49 | $86.84 |
| PPC Better | 2,445 | $21,988 | 631 | $8.99 | $34.85 |
We increased traffic by 96%, increased leads by 151% and decreased cost per lead 60%.
Conclusion
PPC Better substantially improved performance for a multi location pest control company’s Google Ads campaigns. We deployed our standard paid search optimization strategies. In this case there was a dramatic impact on cost per click. We were able to buy higher quality traffic at a lower price resulting in a dramatic increase in leads. Our campaign strategies and structure work consistently for many categories of lead generation focused advertisers. Request a free strategy session to learn more about how PPC Better can help.
