Search Engines MD PPC Case Study

Our PPC strategy consists of focusing on high-converting keywords, examining keywords to exclude search terms without the correct intent and tailoring our bidding to minimize overspend.  There are several keyword categories that we do not generally pursue because of their low return on ad spend and/or low purchase intent.  By implementing our step-by-step strategy we were able to provide significant improvements in several key categories primarily in overall cost and cost per lead acquisition without sacrificing overall lead volumes.  

Branded Campaigns

In our branded Google Ads campaign which is bidding on the dealership’s own name.  We were able to save the dealership in excess of $500 per month on a single campaign.  We did this by lowering the average cost per click from $1.37 to $.03 per click and spent a total of $4.12 versus $509.22.  This was a decrease of 99.2% in the total amount spent and 97.8% in cost per click.  While sacrificing total clicks in the amount of 57% from 373 to 160.  As for branded search, we do not target 100% search impression share as to avoid cannibalizing SEO work around brand awareness.

OEM Dealer Terms

The Organization of Search Terms between Vendors was a bit different but overall for similar search terms so this comparison is of an aggregate of 6 campaigns targeting OEM dealer terms managed by SEMD and the ads from a previous vendor separated into 2 campaigns.  In comparing our methods versus theirs SEMD dropped ad spend to $428.98 per month from $2919.96 for a savings of 85.3%.  The average cost per click went from $5.05 to $0.83, a savings of 83.6% while only losing 60 monthly clicks, a drop in clicks of 5.8%.

Lead Conversions

At SEMD our primary base focus is on lead generation.  While we track clicks, VDP views, SRP views etc., for our metric we do not consider them conversions, we count only hard conversions including phone calls, form fills, chat starts, and trade inquiries.  For the period in question here is the data from Google Ads.

The total number of leads for the period in question was 40.4 which equates to a total cost per lead of $10.68.