Here’s the second installment in our Merchant Spotlight series, where we look at before-and-after results of local search campaigns.
THE MERCHANT: An electrical services franchise in central Florida.
THE SERVICES: Residential and commercial electrical services, including installations, repairs, system maintenance and inspections.
THE PROBLEM: Before working with MatchCraft, the electrical franchise’s campaign drove a decent number of clicks (71 per month) but only 12 calls – and calls, of course, were the more valuable leads the business wanted. What’s more, the aggregated cost per lead was $77.82, high even in the competitive home improvement category.
THE SOLUTION: When it came to optimization, there was one thing MatchCraft campaign manager Justin Brooks couldn’t do: expand the campaign’s geographic targeting. “It’s a franchise, so the business is limited to a clearly defined service area – and the campaign was already set up to target all the locations where they could work,” Brooks explains. Instead, he created separate ad groups with keywords and ad copy specific to the business’s different service offerings rather than general electrical services. “When a user is searching for a specific term like ‘outdoor landscape lighting’ or ‘electric vehicle charging station’ and they see an ad that mentions that very service, click-through rates go up and the campaign performs even better,” Brooks says.
THE RESULTS: After moving the electrical franchise’s search campaign to MatchCraft’s AdVantage platform in August 2014, the business immediately started getting more calls at a lower price. Thanks to Brooks’s smart optimizations and MatchCraft’s automated bidding and pacing algorithms, the cost per lead has continued to decline even as the number of calls has risen. The business now gets about 30 calls per month at an average cost per lead around $20, and 60 clicks per month at a CPC of less than $10 – in both cases, a much better return on the franchise’s marketing dollars.