July 24, 2015

Access Training

Liberty Marketing took over the AdWords management for Access Training. Within hours you could see a huge improvement in traffic. Within days it had resulted in many more enquiries. Within weeks it had doubled sales activity and within a year, it has nearly trebled their turnover

Brief

Access Training had been outsourcing the Pay Per Click advertising management to an agency but the only way they could increase sales each month was to keep spending more money. By the time click spend had reached nearly £20,000 a month, they decided to get a second opinion, so asked the team at Liberty Marketing to review the campaigns and see if improvements could be made.

The goals were to not only to pull back the budget to but also to increase sales for plumbing and electrical training courses in particular, but only in specific parts of the UK.

Strategy

The account was in quite a state. It had obviously grown rapidly over time but a lack of strategy was evident when you tried to navigate it. Keywords were in the wrong ad groups, duplicate keywords were common across campaign and bids were hard to make sense of. When we showed this to the management team at Access Training, they decided to let us re-work the campaigns but we thought that it would be best to start again rather than re-structure. If we were going to be managing the account long-term, it would need to be easier to use.

When preparing the new campaigns, we looked at the variety of training courses that they offered and the locations they sought enquiries from, and then mapped out a list of priority areas. These formed the focus of the initial campaigns. We also examined their Analytics to see the traffic that was working for them and looked at their sales data to view the enquiries that were paying off, to ensure that from the start, those would still be central to the account.
We also decided to split keywords out into a much larger number of ad groups, each containing only a handful of search terms. This would allow us to create adverts targeting specific courses and individual cities and regions.

Execution

We built a new account with campaigns for each area of training, with ad groups for each course. We also built up separate ‘localised’ campaigns, to ensure we captured the maximum amount of traffic in each region.

Time was spent researching competitor adverts, to see what others were saying and where Access Training could differentiate. Many competitors were focusing on the same benefits (how much people could improve their income after completing a course), so we split test similar ones against very different messages, such as their accreditation and advanced facilities.

One of the main issues we felt the old account had was wasted clicks on low quality traffic. There simply wasn’t enough in place to stop adverts showing for invalid search terms or for controlling bids at a keyword level. We made sure that the new account used broad match keywords a lot less, negative ones a whole lot more and that the bids reflected the value in the keyword.

Results

The initial results were very good and the long-term results have been astounding.
Straight away, the new account was brining in much more traffic at a far lower cost per visitor and Access Training reported an increase in telephone calls and completed enquiry forms. Once their sales team had worked through the leads, they reported that they were of a far higher quality and were converting at a much greater rate.

The best thing about this is that not only were they now starting to make a lot more money from the traffic, we had shrunk their budget down by just under 80 per cent, to around only £4,000 a month!

Access Training asked us to then take over the management of the account, which we are still doing over a year later and have since rolled out adverts on to Bing, via the Microsoft adCenter Pay Per Click platform. Combining this with on-going enhancements of the campaigns, including continual split testing of adverts and using Analytics data to make informed landing page decisions, has meant that results keep on improving and their average click-through-rate is now in excess of 12 per cent.

The last year has seen a huge transformation on the business, with them reporting a near three-fold increase in turnover, and them deciding to launch two separate side projects, both of which went live with Pay Per Click adverts already in place and generating sales leads within minutes.