PPC Restructure Yields 55%+ YoY traffic and 45%+ YoY Conversion

The Situation

Net Nanny are a top content-control software provider. When we began our PPC engagement with them in July 2017 it was immediately evident that their campaigns were not organized per best practice.

For example, they were actually cannibalizing their search potential by bidding on the same keyword across multiple campaigns. This duplicate coverage meant they were essentially competing with themselves, and making it harder for the search engine to determine which version of the keyword to match to searches. Bing in particular was not driving as much volume as we would’ve anticipated from a brand of Net Nanny’s size.

The Goal

Clean up the account to remove duplicate coverage and improve traffic, conversions, and CPA from Bing within 3-5 months.

The Strategy

We cleaned up the account for two main reasons:

1. Search engine comprehension. It would be easier for Google or Bing to understand the campaigns and keyword coverage leading to better rankings and efficiencies.
2. More control. We would have more levers at our disposal to pull for managing performance optimization and budget allocation.

The clean-up started with eliminating the duplicative keyword coverage. We established a single campaign per keyword rather than bidding on the same core brand terms in multiple campaigns.

Other improvements included subdividing ad groups into more niche collections of keywords, as well as separating them out by match type. Previously, ad groups contained all match types or only Broad Match / Broad Match Modified keywords.

Adding in Exact and Phrase match is better for ranking reasons, as they tend to be more qualified searches than those from Broad, so the stronger CTR helps lift the Rank and Quality Score assessment from the engine.

Keeping match types in their own respective ad group meant we could now control the flow of budget better with the option to turn off match types that are costly and inefficient without sacrificing coverage across the entire keyword family.

Bids were then prioritized across Exact, then Phrase, and Broad Match Modified last; this tells the engine to match as many searches as possible to Exact first, then Phrase, and Broad last.

As we subdivided ad groups and addressed the match types items above, the team also added keyword coverage to shore up areas where gaps had been identified. Using Keyword Planner (as well as YTD Search Query Reports from both Google and Bing) helped identify individual keywords and keyword themes to target.

Lastly, we moved the campaigns from Manual CPC bidding to Enhanced CPC bidding to give Bing more flexibility to bid on higher quality searchers to secure conversions.

The Results

Comparing H1 2017 to H1 2018, the client enjoyed a 55% lift in traffic and a 45% increase in conversions. The new campaign hierarchy also led to a 92% improvement in Lost IS to Rank – meaning the program was ranking better after the changes went into place leading to lower CPCs and stronger Quality Score values.

The increase in traffic and orders from Bing has lead to an increased investment in this search engine and Net Nanny now has a consistent 93% of Impression Share on the Search Page, blended across Brand and Non-brand terms.

Looking at the short term, the program saw immediate benefits from the restructure.

The Paid Search engagement began in June, restructure work in July, and by the end of July / early August traffic, conversions, and CPC improvements were already happening.