PandaDoc Google Ads Case Study: Reduced CPA by 450% and Increased Conversions by 300%
PandaDoc is a unicorn status start-up that offers a great solution for every organization that plans to improve their workflows, work on insights, and streamline enterprise operations. They contacted me to help bring their Spanish account within profitability. Eventually, I managed their Spanish, German, Dutch, and French accounts. On average, the cost per acquisition (CPA) came down to around 20-30 Euros from as high as 150 Euros.
The Situation
Even though businesses were using Pandadoc across various European nations, such as Poland and Sweden, they were not getting the desired output from their respective accounts. The CPA was over $100 for Spain and France, and for Netherlands and Germany, it was well over $150. They wanted to make a successful EU launch, so they hired me as a consultant to execute and manage their strategies while lowering the overall CPA across all accounts.
Company description
PandaDoc is an American software company providing SaaS software. Their innovative document automation software can quickly streamline the creation of business contracts, Quotes, Payments, Proposals, HIPAA, Forms, SDK, and API.
- ONE
1
The Challenge
I immediately noticed that all the accounts had the same structure, mainly because they replicated the USA account into the German, Dutch, French, and Spanish market. It was obvious once I began managing the Spanish account that this led to wasteful spending.
Considering language and cultural factors is crucial before developing strategies for a new country. Every country or nation has its distinctive socio-cultural background; trust me, replicating the same strategy in new markets you’re trying to enter will not work.
For any Google Ads account, the “KEYWORDS” are one of the vital sections. The Spanish, French, Dutch, and German accounts had picked the keywords from the USA account and translated them literally. This is very bad practice – to assume that simply by translating keywords into another language, you can expect people to type those same new keywords and even find your website. The translation should be done by a professional translator who understands the language (obviously) and, most importantly, the intent behind the keywords.
For instance, let’s consider the Spanish account. One of their good keywords was “digital signature.” It would make sense for someone who hasn’t done any prior market/keyword research to assume that people in Spain would be looking for something similar, e.g., ‘firma digital.’ However, after some extensive market research, it was obvious that people searching for this keyword expected to find the “digital signature” solution provided by the government. This meant that the previous agency or freelancer was bidding on a keyword that would lead users to the wrong page, i.e., not the government solution page.
In other words, people searching this keyword were finding themselves on the wrong site, costing the client a fortune. I opted for a similar approach on all the remaining Ad accounts. I concentrated on researching the different use cases and realized I had to scrap out the entire account and develop a new one from scratch.
my Approach
I started by doing some research on the competitors and the market. I went through all the competitors, including Everysign, HelloSign, Adobe Acrobat Sign, DocuSign, and several others. I also went to their products to check which ones are responsible for generating high levels of qualified leads.
This can be done by analyzing the following:
- What landing pages are running the most ads
- What landing pages are getting the most (organic, referral, and paid) traffic
- What landing pages are most optimized for SEO and better designed
- What landing pages are getting backlinks (i.e., the more prominent a feature or landing page, the more recommendations/referrals from other third-party websites)
Doing this type of research was crucial because NOT all the marketing leads will translate into sales. In other words, traffic does not equal sales. Obvious, right? Unfortunately, not many websites I audited understood this. Hence, it is crucial to develop thorough market/keyword/customer research to refine the website traffic to the highest possible quality.
I also worked and helped the team with the landing page to improve the conversion rate. Through a successful test, keeping one Call To Action rather than two was the right option. Making things simple for all the users is key, so we left a single action without further distractions. After this test, the conversion rate increased by a whopping 140%.
- TWO
2
I worked with native speakers to rewrite all the landing pages. This is a perfect example for those who wish to be culturally focused. When users access your landing page, they should feel connected. But just simply translating the website from one language to another will do more harm than good. In addition, I helped optimize all the relevant landing pages for SEO.
As a professional consultant, I recommend keeping your website’s landing pages SEO-optimized to enhance the quality score of the Ads. This means, for instance, including all the keywords in H1, H2, and H3 tags. They should be distributed evenly across the entire text with phrases and synonyms that offer further context. You must also do the following:
- Optimize all the ALT images
- The content should be well-researched and natural.
- The internal links in other landing pages or blog articles should point toward the corresponding pages to gain more relevant signals.
The Google Ads Convertion Rate
Non-Branded Conversion
CPA
In these SEO case studies, you can learn how to increase traffic, rank for more keywords, and improve your ranking on search results through effective and targeted digital marketing consultancy.
Each case study is a real-life example designed to help you understand the SEO strategies you could adopt to achieve the same results with your website.