When quick wins are needed – optimise first: A Plush Home Design & Staging Case Study

Plush Home Design & Staging are a relatively new player in the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie property staging and design market. Having worked for many years in Sydney as a home designer and stylist, Sarah Boshnyak and her husband Vlad moved to Newcastle to be closer to family and start their own home design and staging business.

Whilst Sarah and Vlad had a nice new website and active social channels, they knew they needed a search engine presence to compete with more established brands. They set up a Google AdWords campaign, however struggled to see any return for their investment, and were not getting any leads. Without sales, the business was just not going to be sustainable for long.

“After trying my hand at Google AdWords on my own, I soon realised that I needed to call in the professionals to work their magic and get results,” Sarah said.

Sarah and Vlad knew there were a lot of things they could implement to improve their marketing and build growth, but what they needed right now was some quick wins. They approached Method+Marketing with the question: What are we doing wrong with our pay-per-click campaign and how can we improve it to generate leads?

This was a common issue that Method+Marketing had come across before, having found that it usually boils down to two things: 1) keywords, and 2) landing pages.

The first step Method+Marketing undertook was an audit of the current AdWords campaign set up, analytics, and the landing page content, calls to action, and design.

“Sarah and Vlad had actually done an awesome job of setting up the AdWords campaign,” said Ange. “The content in the ad sets was great, they just needed a few tweaks regarding their latest offers and calls to action. They were targeting relevant keywords also, but required some broadening of the search terms scope.”

The key issue that was found with the Plush Home Design & Staging campaign set-up was around keyword match types. This is a common and easy mistake to make, and without the in-depth knowledge of how to set up keywords, a setting might be selected which can restrict the performance of the campaign. It pays to learn about these settings and understand which one would best deliver against the campaign objectives.

AdWords Keyword Match Types

MATCH TYPESPECIAL SYMBOLEXAMPLE KEYWORDADS MAY SHOW ON SEARCHED THATEXAMPLE SEARCHES
Broad MatchNoneWomen’s hatsincludes misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variationsbuy ladies hats
Broad Match Modifier+ keyword+women’s+hatscontain the modified term (or closer variations, but not synonyms), in any orderhats for women
Phrase Match“keyword”“women’s hats”are a phrase, and close variations of that phrasebuy women’s hats
Exact Match[keyword][women’s hats]are an exact term and close variations of that exact termwomen’s hats

Method+Marketing optimised the campaign with revised CTA’s, a broader range of keywords, correct match type, and moved on to tackle the landing page.

“The campaign had been driving traffic to the website home page and had been delivering a great click-thru rate, but the clicks weren’t converting into leads,” said Katie. “The homepage wasn’t well optimised to generate leads, and given Sarah and Vlad were offering a great seasonal deal to attract new business, it was going to be more effective as a new campaign landing page.”

Katie and Ange developed a campaign landing page that was geared up for lead generation, with strong calls to action, appealing imagery and a lead form designed to deliver qualified leads to Sarah and Vlad to follow up on.

As those who click-thru from the campaign are likely to review the rest of the website before handing over contact details, we also optimised the rest of the website with tweaks to content, calls-to-action and user experience.

Sarah and Vlad were pleasantly surprised to see immediate results. In the first month, the campaign achieved:

  • A 60% increase in clicks through to the website as compared to the 2 previous months
  • A 75% monthly increase in leads generated as compared to previous 2 months

“Each month, we monitor campaign activity, and analyse the conversion percentages to track growth or identify declining performance. When performance slows we work on optimising ad content, keywords, budget and the landing page in order to find the new sweet spot for month-on-month growth in traffic and leads. And we continue to work with Plush Home Design & Staging with advice on ways to nurture their leads through to a sale” said Katie.

While this campaign ticks away delivering the quick wins Plush Home Design & Staging needed to continue, it gives them some breathing space to focus on building other strategies for growth.

“Katie and Ange transformed our Google AdWords and landing page for the better,” said Sarah. “They know how to get their customers the best results.  We’ve been so happy with their service, knowledge, and advice.”

If you are having trouble getting results from your Google AdWords campaigns, they may just need some optimisation and improvements to your landing page. We recommend contacting us to discuss our Pay-Per-Click execution services.

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