PPC Case Study

Car Sales Industry

In this case study, I’m going to show you how we took a failing Google Ads campaign and turned it into an enormous success.

In fact, we were able to generate 752 leads in the first 90 days of their campaign!

Here’s how we did it:

Background

Our goal was to generate new leads and have the sales team be able to follow up with the prospect while they’re browsing the online inventory.

Before they started using our PPC management service, they had spent over $70,000 in paid ads in a little over 6 years.

They also spent tens of thousands on past agencies that, from what our client told us, “really didn’t move the needle much” for their business.

So how did we turn this campaign around?

Let’s break it down!

Uncovering A Big Tracking Issue

If you want to know if a campaign is working, you must have accurate tracking.

The first problem we encountered when auditing this account was that the tracking was not set up properly.

We saw that the tracking was reporting 10’s of thousands of leads, so that seemed off.

When we dug into it, we found that this account was counting a lead every time someone hit a general page on their site – not a thank you or confirmation page, but a general page on their website.

This resulted in the campaign reporting thousands of “leads” that didn’t actually exist!

We wiped out any irrelevant conversion actions that skewed our data and started from scratch with new conversion tracking.

Our conversion “goal” was placed on the thank you page after a lead fills out a form, so we know that we actually collected the information from the lead.

Starting Fresh With New Search Campaigns

In our campaign research process, we work with the client to figure out what are the driving levers of their business and what they want to target.

Once we decide on a theme, we’ll do competitive research to figure out what angles are used by competitors, what the offer should be, etc.

In this case, our client wanted to target a general audience looking for used vehicles in their area.

Since the previous campaign’s data was skewed, we started fresh with 2 brand new campaigns.

The first campaign was themed around “Used Cars” and the other campaign was a branded campaign.

We crafted high-converting copy for the ads and paired them with tight ad groups. We always make sure we’re using message match to get the highest CTRs!

Then we used location targeting to limit where the ads were being served to only their local area.

Setting Up High Converting Landing Pages

In the past, the account was driving traffic to their homepage.

This is usually not optimal for lead generation campaigns because homepages are typically not designed for conversions.

Instead, we wanted to drive traffic to very specific landing pages that matched exactly what they were searching for and were optimized to convert highly.

In this case, we developed a landing page to start based on used cars. We saw that the other competitors would send the traffic to the inventory pages because people want to browse the inventory, so this became our offer.

This landing page collects the lead’s information and offers to “view” the inventory.

That way, we collect the information upfront and the client’s sales team can follow up.

The Results

After setting up proper tracking, creating new campaigns, writing new ad copy, and creating custom landing pages, we turned on the traffic…

…and the leads started pouring in!

In fact, within 90 days we had already generated over 700+ leads!

That is not including over 1,033 site visits (Not to the landing page) and also 84 actions taken for directions.

As we optimize this existing campaign, we also have plans to expand to other vehicle type-specific landing pages (used trucks, used SUVs, etc).

Conclusion

With the right strategy, you can take a failing campaign and turn it around just like we did for this auto dealer.

If you want help turning your campaigns around, getting more leads, or getting more ROI out of your ads, check out our PPC management program!