A major house painting franchise with locations across the United States and Canada had found themselves in a difficult position. For many years, they had been relying on direct mail to generate leads for their franchisees across North America. In 2006, they found the number of leads that they received from their direct mail campaign drop dramatically. To make up for this deficit, they turned to paid search to drive traffic to their website.
However, after implementing this campaign for a 5-month period with an outside provider, they were deeply disappointed by the paltry number of leads they were generating. Moreover, given the unique nature of their business model, namely using college students as their painters during the summer months, they only had two months left of their peak season to generate as much business as possible in order to salvage the season.
The Paid Search Strategy
Rapidly the campaign was re engineered with several thousand geo-specific keywords across multiple search platforms, all within a matter of days.
To begin with, the campaign was greatly expanded. the existing campaign of just about 10-20 keywords was expanded to over 25,000 keywords in under a week’s time. The campaign was broken out into geographic regions to ensure the campaign was targeted to the client’s required sales territory and longtail keywords were optimized to ensure the most effective and low cost traffic would be delivered.
The Bottom Line Results
Through aggressive marketing and careful bid management, results were far exceed compared to the client’s previous results as well as expectations, delivering thousands of leads at an average cost per acquisition of $93, far lower than the $120+ they were used to paying with direct mail. What’s more, this cost per acquisition declined substantially over the course of the campaign as a result of campaign refinement, reaching $68 per qualified local lead at the end of the first sales season and is now at $44 qualified lead.
After the initial test campaign in the spring and summer of 2006, results prompted the 2007 campaign to include an expanded pay per click strategy, its duration and geography as well as an Internet Yellow Pages trial and consultative Search Engine Optimization services during a website re- development initiative.
The 2008 seasonal campaign reduced the CPA to below the all time low, down to $31 cost per lead, approximately a quarter of the cost of the original cost per lead.
With year round natural search strategies, brand monitoring and reputation management, the client’s overall visibility markedly increased. The client’s response?
“We are extremely pleased with the amount of attention to our. We are getting much better cost per conversion than we’ve received elsewhere. The learning process has been great as we are taken through the results and ongoing recommendations.”
