IGI has been around for a million internet years (30 in normal years) and had three core services on offer: Personal Brand Coaching; Image Consulting; and Reputation Management. They had been using Google Ads as their key paid advertising platform, and like everything that has been around for 30 years, their results weren’t what they used to be and came to Stage3 to put some fresh life into the performance marketing.

What is?

The start of every assignment, we always start with What is? What is currently working; What are the numbers telling us etc.  

There was one Google Search Ad campaign which had 36 Ad Groups, which can be ok in some circumstances (particularly if you are using Single Keyword Ad Groups), but unfortunately for this campaign there was a lot of crossover and the Ag Groups were fighting against each other. The result was only 17 of these Ad Groups were getting any clicks, with one Ad Group getting 60% of Traffic. The click through rates were pretty good though, as they had been using Dynamic Keyword Insertion in the ad copy.  

Once they clicked on the ad, the potential customer was presented with the client's website. From there, no one really knew what was going on as there wasn’t any conversion tracking.

What Works cycle (What If?> What Works?> What Wows?)

First, we got to work re-organising the Google Ads account structure. When creating campaigns in the Google Ads platform, we always like to split them by the product or service category, so we created four discrete campaigns: Brand Search (i.e. their name); Personal Brand Search; Image Consulting Search; Remarketing Display.

When then went into their Search Terms report to see what people were actually putting into Google that was triggering their ads to see which ones were the best performing terms. When then used these to create Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs). Now, we don’t always use SKAGs, but they are a pretty good strategy to not waste your money on junk clicks.  

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Improvement? ✅

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Not stopping at just Google Ads, we created new landing pages to ensure that there was congruency between the ad and the website we were presenting.  

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Improvement? ✅

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We love a good A-B test here at Stage3. If you’re not familiar with that term, it essentially means we tested two “things” against each other to see which one wins. This is how you optimise over time. Run little experiments and keep the ones that work and turn off the ones that don’t.

So, we ran some A-B tests on the landing pages to see which ones had a higher conversion rate (referred to as Conversion Rate Optimisation). We first started off with some minor tests on the headline copy (words). Then got into some heavier stuff like video vs image, but what really had an impact was the Call-To-Action (CTA – you know... the thing you ask your website visitors to do).  

In one landing page the prospective client filled out a form which then put them into an email auto-responder sequence. Standard stuff.  

But on the other page, they were presented with an option to make a booking right in their calendar... right on the page.  

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Improvement? ✅✅

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