Paid search campaign soars above expectations

Quantity vs. quality – when it comes to leads, most Sales teams will say they want both. So what do you do when your paid search campaign is driving low quality leads that don’t convert to customers?

That was the challenge UL EHS Sustainability had been grappling with when they engaged Arketi Group.

After a thorough overhaul of the pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, lead volume and quality both jumped dramatically – while cost per lead dropped by a factor of 6.

A division of the well-known Underwriters Laboratories, UL EHS Sustainability helps more than 2,000 companies worldwide protect the well-being of workers, reduce risk, improve productivity, enhance compliance, and drive business improvement. At the core of these capabilities are the company’s platforms for employee health and safety, occupational health, environmental, supply chain, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility.

Many customers looking for such services start by searching online, and UL EHS Sustainability had been running paid ads on Google AdWords for some time.

POOR QUALITY LEADS The PPC campaign initially delivered impressive numbers – up to 200 leads per month at its peak. But while the volume was on target, many of the leads were not a great fit – UL EHS Sustainability was looking to target larger enterprises, not SMBs – and the Sales team struggled to close deals from these web leads. Disenchanted with the results, UL EHS Sustainability eventually shut the PPC campaign off altogether.

How we did it

As confirmed believers in the value of online search for BtoB lead generation, Arketi Group jumped at the opportunity to revive and reconfigure UL EHS Sustainability’s dormant paid search effort.

Our search team started by adjusting campaign keywords, editing ad copy and updating landing page layouts and copy. We also tweaked bidding strategies and built out a list of negative keywords to help eliminate irrelevant clicks.

Even these minor interventions had an immediate impact: the number of conversions dropped significantly, while the quality of the leads that did convert improved dramatically.

Encouraged by these early results, UL EHS Sustainability directed Arketi to undertake a top-to-bottom campaign overhaul. Our search team reworked ad groups to narrow their focus, while every one of the 100+ ads was rewritten with calls-to-action explicitly targeting an enterprise audience. The landing pages were rebuilt from scratch to incorporate best practices, optimized copy and responsive design.

The results we achieved

Within the first month, the new approach started paying off. Lead flow swelled as conversions more than tripled, while cost per conversion dropped by 68 percent.

COST PER CONVERSIONS And these results were sustained. Over a four-month span, conversions grew to more than 700 percent of the baseline, while cost per conversion plummeted to less than 17 percent of what UL EHS Sustainability had originally been paying per lead.

LEAD QUALITY Most importantly, quality improved significantly. UL EHS Sustainability’s Sales team was more than satisfied with both the volume and quality of the leads received from Marketing.

Of course, nothing stands still, especially in online marketing, so we continue to monitor, test and optimize this winning campaign to ensure the lead flow continues.

Quantity vs. quality – when it comes to leads, most Sales teams will say they want both. The results of this campaign show that, sometimes, you don’t have to choose between quantity and quality.