The Challenge:
When Digitall Comms were struggling to exceed 10 Google ad conversions per campaign per month, we decided to deploy Offline Conversion Tracking (OCT) to assist.
The low rate of conversions meant that the client was stuck using a manual cost-per-click strategy – OCT would help us gather much more data to optimise the campaigns.
Before we went down the route of implementing OCT, we’d also checked the search queries, keywords, conversion tracking and landing pages, to make sure this was not an incorrect search intent issue, nor a CRO issue.
We couldn’t find any obvious errors in performance, but we knew one thing: that we weren’t utilising a smart bidding strategy. This felt like a missing piece of the account since we knew the machine would be able to determine which users would be more or less likely to convert within a smart bidding strategy.
The Solution:
This year, we started to track offline conversions by manually pulling the GCLID from the user’s form into the client’s website CMS via a hidden field. We then imported all the GCLID data back into Google Ads with an associated value that the user brought to the business.
Because the campaigns naturally increased in conversions, we switched the campaigns from an enhanced CPC bid strategy to a maximise conversion value bid strategy.
Why? Well, we wanted to start telling Google to optimise future bids towards those who have brought high product values to the business (even if they didn’t turn into actual sales) because these were highly relevant users.
This was a big risk at the time since we didn’t have tons of conversion data and we were uncapping our keywords’ CPCs. However, we felt the change was necessary to kick-start the account.
The Results:
This has been the only major change, and so far, the bid strategy has been very successful. We’ve seen a +750% influx in contact conversions when comparing the latest quarter to the previous year, despite no change to costs (±1%) and actually a drop in PPC clicks (-37%). All while making no other changes to conversion tracking year-on-year.
The account has gone from being ineffective and unscalable last year to an account which has opened up new future avenues and strategies for future scaling. All of this was purely due to us being able to better utilise first-party conversion data, and optimise for a value-based bidding approach.
“We’ve been working with Splitpixel on our Google Ads campaigns and have appreciated their professional approach and responsiveness. We’ve seen a noticeable increase in lead quality since partnering with them. Highly recommended!”
Digitall Comms