URL: www.replacement-mattress.com
Industry: This e-commerce site is closely related to a brick and mortar store along with a replacement mattress factory/warehouse in central New Jersey. The site’s two main product ranges are comprised of sofa bed mattresses and RV mattresses.
Services: Advertising via Google AdWords
Date range: June 2013 – now
Context: Even though AdWords campaigns were running for some time, they weren’t performing as expected, cost per conversion being very high.
Challenges: The industry is highly competitive, both national outlets (Amazon, Overstock, Target, Kmart) and other SMEs promote the replacement mattresses available on their sites, thus advertising costs are relatively high. Even though summer months represent a peak in seasonality and the number of clicks rose, the number of conversions was actually lower than in previous months, despite the fact that the company started offering a free mattress cover with every order.
Actions taken:
After an in-depth analysis there were several modifications made, which collectively improved results. The main changes which yielded results were:
– Implemented ad scheduling in order to spend the majority of the budget in the afternoons, rather than in the mornings.
– Started bidding more on search queries from regions which historically brought more conversions.
– Narrowed targeting both by taking measures to significantly decrease irrelevant impressions from outside the target market, and by pausing underperforming networks (Google search partners, Google Display etc.)
Results:
– Conversion rate improved by 140%.
– Cost per conversion decreased by 60%.
– Search impression share increased from approximately 20% to over 50%.
Conclusion:
PPC Campaigns are more than just creating professional ads and getting them to run at a low cost per click. Effective PPC Campaigns need to generate conversions at an optimum cost. Therefore, it is of high importance to continuously analyze stats and work on further increasing ROI.