Welcome to our Merchant Spotlight series. This is the first in a series of posts looking at before-and-after results of local business search campaigns.
THE MERCHANT: A full-service heating and cooling installation and repair company serving the greater Baltimore area.
THE SERVICES: Installation and repair of traditional and geothermal heating, air conditioning and air purification systems. Also provides electrical contracting services.
THE PROBLEM: HVAC is a highly competitive search category, so high click costs aren’t out of the ordinary. However, before its search campaign was transferred to MatchCraft’s AdVantage platform, the HVAC company was seeing costs per click (CPC) north of $23 and cost per lead (based on tracked calls) of $127.50 – high even for HVAC.
THE SOLUTION: AdVantage’s automated bidding and pacing started to bring costs down right away – within a month, CPL was down more than 30%. MatchCraft campaign optimization specialist Justin Brooks then split some of the Ad Groups into more tightly focused segments to improve ad relevancy. He also added negative keywords that he found from the running the search terms report. “These were relatively small adjustments, but they really helped focus the campaign and increase the number of good clicks and calls the merchant was getting,” says Brooks.
THE RESULTS: Six months after moving the campaign to MatchCraft’s AdVantage platform, the HVAC company now gets four times as many leads per month, at a cost per lead of $40.81 – a 69% decrease. CPC has also dropped more than 40%. “The merchant is extremely happy with the ROI on this campaign,” says Brooks.