The Challenge:
As a digital marketing consultancy, we often conduct Google Ads audits for prospective clients before we start working with them. These audits gauge what issues and work are needed both on a website and within an account – they’re helpful in finding the diagnosis to improve performance!
Eco-friendly printing company Bag It Don’t Bin It (BIDBI) approached us for help when they noticed their Google Ads account suddenly started converting a lot more frequently – but the lead quality of the conversions was unusually poor.
After auditing the account, the issue was abundantly clear: the conversion tracking was manipulating performance for the worse. BIDBI’s account had a Performance Max campaign up and running, and they had three main conversion tracking tags: Form X, Form Y, and Lead Forms.
“Lead Form – Submit” is an auto-created Google Ads conversion action, which is only created when the advertiser creates a Lead Form as a Google Ads asset (or extension). They appear in the form below an ad in the search results and don’t require users to click through to the website.
For BIDBI, since their Performance Max campaign was set to run on the account default conversion goals, it got incredibly good at optimising for Lead Forms. The issue? Well, about 95% of the users who were filling out these forms were spam.
The Solution
It was a simple solution – we turned off Lead Form assets. The Performance Max campaign went from spending all its budget within the first hour to going back into an eight-week phase of re-learning important conversion goals.
The Results
This simple change meant that lead quality immediately improved. All of a sudden, BIDBI’s sales team were receiving genuine enquiries, and not forms submitted by bots.
Unsurprisingly, it has meant that all our conversions are now website-based, resulting in a +603% increase in website form submissions compared to the previous period.
It’s also opened up the opportunity of using Offline Conversion Tracking, where we are now able to feed Google Ads the revenue brought in from each form submission, allowing for value-based bidding in the near future.
Sometimes, the issue in an account is simple to a marketer, but can be so incredibly frustrating for a business – especially in BIDBI’s case, when their Google Ads platform was showing good results at the surface level.
If you’re having similar problems, contact one of our PPC team today by getting in touch – we’ll be happy to help!
‘Before we came to Splitpixel, our PPC campaign was not in the best shape. We had some historic success but had seen a huge stagnation which was really dragging a core side of the business down. Meeting with the team at Splitpixel was really easy and I immediately could see that they were knowledgeable and driven to get results, bringing new ideas to the table and being honest about the current state of our campaigns. Since the account has been under their wing, our internal discussions around PPC have gone from “Why have we spent so much and not seen anything in return”, to “Let’s see how much more we can do with Splitpixel”.’
BIDBI