Client Case Studies

Background:

We were introduced to the owners of a successful modern hearing aid center located in a 2-story strip-mall type building in a medium-sized Western US City. The owner is an Audiologist, supported by a staff of managers and professionals. They provide hearing tests and guide customers to the right class of hearing aid.

Results:

With changes in Federal Law and the arrival of direct-to-consumer (d2c) hearing aids, they wanted to increase brand awareness and communicate their value-add to the local community. We designed and deployed search and display campaigns for them, including html5 dynamic video ads running on Google, and display ads on the Microsoft Audience Network. We soon optimized the search campaigns into strong profitability on both the Google and Microsoft search engines.

Background:

A family business had grown into a 150-employee company that became the leading regional supplier of HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning services statewide. Over the previous five years, they had hired several large agencies to manage their account, but they weren’t getting the results they wanted.

We began with a baseline audit of their account and campaigns. What we found was their account was running almost 40 campaigns, all configured with manual bidding! Another important discovery was that their account structure had been dictated around the assumption that every sizeable town in their state needed to have its own campaign, targeted just to that location. We call this “hyper-localization”. This is a rather major assumption, and once made it comprises other performance-impacting decisions in an account like this. So it’s a highly impactful assumption.

Upon further research and discussions, we learned that their brand is strong enough that this assumption was given too much credence. Consumers all over the State are aware of and comfortable with this firm. So we revisited the approach to their advertising campaigns, top-down.

Results:

What we deployed reduced the nearly 40-campaign account into six. We set up conversion tracking with 3rd-party call tracking, event-triggered form submission conversions triggered in GA4, and chat-messaging tracking for LiveChat. This allowed us to move the six new campaigns onto automatic bidding within a month.

The result in terms of campaign metrics was a tripling in operating margin and a __ % increase in return on ad spend (ROAS). Because the campaigns are now on automated bidding, they require far less time for maintenance and can follow the seasonal swings in their market.

Background:

A privately-held insurance company had grown from “unheard of”, to over 200 employees in 5 years. Their billboards plaster the highways in their State, targeting the lower-income and high-risk insurance demographic. At the time we took this client on, they had exhausted the returns from billboard, radio, and TV advertising and were looking to get more serious with digital.

Underlying this project was, of course, their own messaging and brand culture which they were quite good at. So the ad copy was already pretty strong, and we improved it to fit the digital channel a bit. But the big challenge was in campaign type, campaign structure, and especially – geo-targeting / ad spend allocation.

Results:

We purchased an embossed map of the State that breaks it down into the county and zip-code level, and over a 4-week period arrived at a 3-level hierarchy for the campaigns, which put the right ads in the right place at the right time. It succeeded spectacularly. We managed the account for a relatively short span of time, until our client, a VP, left to pursue an opportunity. But the experience we gained building and optimizing these campaigns has proved useful in many ways!

Background:

A prominent psychologist renowned for his expertise in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) treatment, based in the Northeast US, approached our agency seeking to boost his practice to reach a “booked solid” level.

We conducted a thorough market analysis and identified high click costs compared to the client’s ad spend. We designed a tightly targeted search ad campaign using phrase and exact-match keywords. We supplemented the search campaign with a display ad campaign to generate brand exposure. During campaign optimization, we meticulously extracted hundreds of negative keywords from search queries to tighten the targeting further. The campaigns were scaled down to fewer positive keywords, to avoid the “digital cliff threshold”, an oft-violated phenomenon that can lead to PPC campaign failure.

Results:

The campaign’s success surpassed expectations, and the psychologist’s practice reached maximum patient capacity within weeks. As a unique tactic, we put the campaigns on manual e-CPC bidding so that we can turn off the campaigns during peak times and reactivated them during slower periods, efficiently managing patient flow.

While the results were gratifying, we advised the client to explore additional advertising avenues. Specifically, we recommended considering Facebook Ads for a lower-cost online presence, as a simple online listing would suffice for his practice. Not all businesses require the direct marketing power of Google Ads!

Background:

We were engaged by a successful U.S.-based consumer electronics manufacturer. The employee managing their Google Ads account in-house had left the company. Our first step was to familiarize ourselves with their product line and gain a detailed understanding of the market they dominate. Most importantly, we wanted deeper insights into the purchasing motivations of their customers.

During the first year managing this account, we scrapped their 14 legacy search and shopping campaigns replacing them with a comprehensive mix of 9 search, display, video, and shopping campaigns. Over time, the shopping campaigns evolved into PMax campaigns.

During the 2nd year of this project, Steve Bell visited their manufacturing facility on the East Coast. He spent the better part of a day visiting each station on the production floor, visiting with the workers, and gaining insights into different aspects of their manufacturing process. This armed us with a deeper understanding of the uniqueness of their products and a better grasp of why the demand for their products is so strong. We incorporated those insights into their ad copy over the following months.

Results:

The results of our work have been transformative, with a consistent return on ad spend (ROAS) jumping from 250% to 1,400%-1,800%. The operating margin now exceeds $1M per month. We continuously monitor and fine-tune these campaigns, making incremental improvements throughout the month. These adjustments continue to compound, delivering exceptional results for this client.

Background:

Paid search advertising campaigns often become a valuable resource for attorneys, from single practitioners to large-scale law partnerships. Typically, the legal specialties where PPC advertising works the best, become the most expensive. Cost per click (CPC) in some US Metro legal markets can exceed $60-80!

One solo practitioner of criminal law had been having trouble generating adequate lead flow volume despite spending $100/day on PPC for some time. She operates in a major US metro area, so competition is fierce.

We went through three rounds of campaign builds over six months to find the optimal campaign structures and mix of campaign types. We also referred the attorney to a web developer who improved the website, bringing quality scores up and click costs down.

Results:

After a period of testing and experimentation, we ended up “cracking the code” for this particular client. Within a year we had the campaigns generating 40 new client leads per month, at a $65 CPA. The campaigns require regular maintenance to hold account performance at this level.

Background:

A 75-employee, East coast based lighting service company employs dozens of technicians and a fleet of trucks and vans. They service, repair, and replace traffic lights, street lighting, and related equipment. Having grown and thrived on local government contracts, they wanted to diversify and grow by adding commercial accounts.

We changed the structure of their paid advertising account to create 5 search campaigns, each targeting a different type of primary service that they offer. They were geo-targeted to the business and industrial zip codes with the appropriate b2b demographics within their high population-density service area. We deployed display and video campaigns for brand development to make potential customers aware of their expansion into commercial lighting installation and maintenance.

Results:

18 months after launching these campaigns, this client has increased commercial business to 20% of its overall revenue. Return on ad spend, estimated because this is a service business, is around 1,000%.

Background:

A leading “travel deals” firm arrived as a client with 900 active search, display, and shopping campaigns. Each targets different adventure activities from horseback riding to helicopter tours. The ad spend was more than $250,000 per month with only a $350,000 operating margin.

In account re-engineering projects, we start by baselining metrics for each campaign in the account. We developed a taxonomy to name, classify and group the campaigns to make the account more manageable. We also developed tactics to replace the legacy campaigns without taking a performance hit from retiring them.

Results:

After three months we consolidated the campaigns to 380 active and moved all of them onto automated bidding, along with major adjustments in ad spend allocations. Operating margins (operating income adjusted for ad spend) increased 185% from $350K to $1M/month.

We took away new insights and skills into managing large-scale PPC accounts, which we’ve since built upon.

A consultant in the UK runs business training programs for affluent private investors. She and her team deliver valuable subject matter expertise to private investors at hotel and resort locations around the world.

After optimizing their search and display ad campaigns, we began looking at the surprisingly weak performance of their YouTube video campaigns.

To fully understand the problem we registered for their free online course and watched videos over a period of time. Putting on our product marketing hat, we went asked “Why aren’t their video campaigns converting well?”. Then, suddenly the problem became clear.

We asked if changes could be made to the videos, but given the professionally-produced nature of the material, it would have cost them a small fortune to have them reworked. So with the client’s permission, we downloaded the videos and made the edits we requested.

We moved the introductory material to the end of the video and shortened the video by 75%. Then, we took the core of the content, where the core of the valuable information was being taught, and cut all the introductory and extraneous material out. The updated videos literally “start in the middle”.

Now the videos jump right to the point where valuable investing strategies are shared with 500+ attendees. The material is amazing, and the audience is clearly fully engaged. We also featured the speaker warmly interacting with attendees during the breaks to further sell the experience.

After reaching a statistically significant level of clicks and conversions, our new approach delivered a 1,100% increase in conversion rate! At the same time, cost per conversion dropped by over 80%, and the average view time went from 117 seconds to 283 seconds, even though the new version is a 1/3 shorter. The bounce rate also declined by 23%.

The best way to convert this type of high-end business seminar is with video ads. But they need to be properly sequenced, engaging, and deliver valuable insights.

Background:

A growing medical concierge practice serving 18 States across the Midwest and Southeastern US offers specialized medical treatments at the consumers’ location.

After launch, a number of challenges were overcome to get these campaigns to perform. Many medical and pharmaceutical keywords are disapproved proactively but erroneously by bots. We were able to work around this over a 4-week period. Another big issue was keyword match precision. In all the search campaigns, we extracted hundreds of negative keywords from search queries, in order to tighten the matching resulting in profitable campaign metrics.

Results:

Working with this client over the past year, we’ve built and optimized 9 successful ad campaigns targeting both their innovative services and their brand. Their patient onboarding volume has leaped 800% to drive a fully-booked, 15-employee practice.

Background:

Blastoff Labs was contracted by a fast-growing software company specializing in financial solutions for small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs). With a customer base typically ranging from 10 to 500 employees, the company sought to enhance its market presence and drive business growth.

To design effective paid search campaigns for the client’s SaaS financial application we needed to understand their software, analyze competitors, assess market positioning, and especially their feature and total cost of ownership differentiation. This is in alignment with our standard process outlined in the video “Boost PPC Performance with Display & Search Campaigns.”

We recommended and implemented nine strategically crafted search and display ad campaigns based on our findings. The search campaigns utilized various ad extension types, including image extensions, while leveraging audience targeting on both mobile and desktop platforms. Our display campaigns employed ad groups for in-market, custom segment, and remarketing audience targeting. We implemented conversion tracking and launched the campaigns by setting a daily ad spend of $250.

Results:

Over four weeks we completed coarse optimization of the campaigns. After six months of continuous fine optimization, including a transition onto automated bidding, the account had achieved an average return on ad spend of 600%. Cost per acquisition (CPA) averaged $150, generating high-quality leads from telephone inquiries, phone calls, and white paper sign-ups. Average cost per click (CPC) has been in steady decline since the campaign launched, while quality scores (QS) consistently improve month-to-month.