A global networking hardware company’s paid search account was in a mature state, performing well, generating more leads quarter-over-quarter, and decreasing cost per lead (CPL) at the same time. The client was also seeing more pipeline and opportunities generated QoQ.

From FY18 to FY19, the client increased budget by 12% with the expectation of generating a 12% increase in the volume of  conversions while maintaining the favorable cost per lead. The objectives were to allocate more dollars to the campaigns that were performing well despite a limited budget and to look for additional opportunities to generate leads.

The goal of the search campaigns was to generate new users, so most of the budget was allocated to non-brand campaigns to attract users who didn’t know about the brand. These campaigns were always limited by budget, and it was challenging to scale them without increasing the overall CPL. Brand campaigns were low volume and the conversion rates of the brands were not as high as the generic campaigns.

Non-brand campaigns were limited by budget and had potential to generate more leads, but they also had the highest CPL. Therefore, the Merkle | DWA team decided to increase the client’s budget by only 3% in order to get new users. The rest of the incremental budget was allocated to remarketing and brand campaigns. The client’s non-brand campaign budgets were increased over 200% and over 100%, respectively. The goal was to leverage branded keywords and remarketing campaigns to nurture the users generated by the non-brand campaigns.

New ad copy and landing pages were constantly rotated in the non-brand ad groups to increase click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR). Third-party reports proved to be successful in lead generation so we leveraged many of them for the different ad groups. Different assets were offered based on the keyword intent. CTR for non-brand campaigns increased 30% and CVR of these campaigns increased by 2%.

In addition, non-brand keywords with high cost per click (CPC) and no conversion volume were paused in order to prioritize the high-converting keywords. As a result, non-brand impressions decreased by 15% while clicks increased 10% and conversions increased 12%.