GlobalTranz is one of the largest 3PL‘s (Third Party Logistics Company) in the nation. They are a technology company at heart, and hundreds of logistics companies utilize their proprietary software to manage their freight brokerage business.
GlobalTranz has over 750 employees and is on pace to do 1 Billion dollars in annual revenue in 2016. Their online marketing is crucial to their sustained growth. GlobalTranz markets
themselves in a variety of effective ways, and online marketing through paid search is one of their leading sources of leads and new clients.
GlobalTranz approached AdVenture Media during a transitional phase when they realized they needed a high-end ad agency to take charge of their paid search campaigns in a way that would really help them understand the money they were spending, where it was going and what results it was generating.
Challenges
Cost Per Click Had Been Steadily Increasing
A steady increase in CPC is on of the most tell-tale signs that an account is being mismanaged. We saw that across multiple accounts CPC had been increasing. This told us that new competitors were bidding in our auctions and that Quality Score was likely suffering due to a lack of active management.
Converted Clicks and Conversion Were Dropping
On a monthly basis, GlobalTranz conversions were dropping while the account continued to spend more and more money. This is a relationship you never want to see. Ideally, as you spend more money, you should be increasing the volume of conversions. However, in this account, we were noticing an inverse (and unhealthy) relationship.
Majority of Keywords Had No Conversions
As you optimize an account over time, the hope is to have campaigns with keywords that are leading to conversions. Every company has a different conversion action, but for GlobalTranz, the conversion action was a visitor submitting the New Agent Opportunity Form.
But most of the keywords in the account were not leading to any conversions, even though they were generating a high volume of clicks and impressions.
While there were other issues in the account, these were the primary metrics that informed us of how much work the account needed. These sore points also gave us a solid foundation from which to work from. We know which areas needed the most work and we know where to begin optimizing and restructuring the account.
Strategy
Main challenges
After a complete diagnosis, we understood where the account was suffering. At this stage, we developed a set of strategies to rebuild the pay per click campaigns from the ground up.
Account Structure
We chose to rebuild the campaign structure by visitor type. GlobalTranz attracts both companies looking for freight management services and individual business owners looking to use the GlobalTranz software to manage their quotes and rates. Targeting the campaigns by visitor or “lead” type allows us to bid with more control and control the schedule of the ads with more precision. Because each type of visitor represents a different sort of financial opportunity for GlobalTranz, it‘s important that we‘re able to manipulate our bids and budgets accordingly. This structure also allows us to analyze the volume and potential reach for each of our target audiences.
Keyword Research
Based on the low click-through rate and low search impression share in the account, we knew we needed to enhance the keyword list. Utilizing manual methods to collect long-tail terms we were able to discover untapped areas with a less saturated competitive landscape. Mixing those keywords carefully with the different match types was the next step.
More importantly, we developed intensive negative keyword lists to weed out unwanted clicks from searches not likely to land a quality ad click. These detailed negative keyword lists gave us the ability to bid more broadly on our choice positive keywords, maintain a high CTR and cost per conversion, increase our keyword-level Quality Scores and reduce our overall cost per click.
Remarketing Ads
GlobalTranz visitors are generally not ready to convert their first time on the site. That being the case, we knew that strategic remarketing campaigns would be crucial to the long term success of their overall marketing budget. We began by building custom audiences and then segmented them out based on where they were in the funnel.
We created three audiences, each with an “engagement” barrier to entry. Our low engagement audience was populated with visitors that spent a minimum of 2 minutes on the landing page, but didn’t view a second page. Our medium-engagement audience had visited 3 pages or more, and our highly engaged audience was reserved for visitors who viewed a predefined number of key pages (i.e contact us page) and spent a minimum amount of time on the site.
With these audiences in place, we were in a position to both create custom ad copy for each type of engagement level and to bid individually on each audience.
Results
- 534% increase in CTR
- 21% decrease in average CPC
- 23% increase in conversion rate
- 27K saved month over month
- 35% decrease in cost per conversion
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