The Red Team Google Ads Case Study: Doubled Conversion Rates and Improved CTR by 150%

Red Team sells construction software to contractors. Today, I’ll show you how I increased conversion rates and CTR in a limited time. Keep reading to see the exact strategies I used to achieve these results.

The Situation

Having left their previous PPC agency that over-promised and under-delivered, RedTeam hired me as a consultant to increase conversion rates through Google Ads and significantly lower their CPA (around 1200 USD per lead). In addition, they wanted me to bring in highly qualified leads to generate non-branded conversions, as most of their conversions had been branded for the past year.

Company description

RedTeam was built by skilled contractors using the power of technology to enhance the construction industry. The software is a project management, construction financials and document control solution suited for midsize commercial general contractors. It consists from multiple products, such as RedTeam Flex, RedTeam Go, and Fieldlens by RedTeam. 

1

The Challenge

ReadTeam has been operating for over 15 years in the construction industry. The market for this particular niche has become quite competitive compared to earlier times. From a Google Ads perspective, I could see the competition, perhaps one of the major reasons I took up this challenge. 

Working on their account was quite compelling, given the nature of the industry, where most businesses had been working with pen and paper for decades. 

The client’s account had spent huge cash running Google Ads with previous “top” agencies. I was referred by a digital marketing director who had been working with me on a different account and saw Google Ads’ potential when managed efficiently. 

In addition to the management of their Google Ads account per se, there was also a need for an effective 360º digital marketing strategy and the entire revamp of their website.

my Approach

Starting with thorough research of the competitors (Buildtrend, Procore, etc.) and the global and national construction market, I came up with the following approach and strategies:

  • Since I had a decent budget, I decided to reverse-engineer the entire Google Ads strategy. To do this, I checked the type of headline our competitors used, their tone, and whether they had utilized jargon or the style was a bit casual. I also assessed the overall layout of their page, such as the design of the page, the color scheme, etc., and the pain points they used. Lastly, and most importantly, I analyzed consumer behavior and historical data for the new approach.
  • During my research, I learned that many successful brands were luring customers by providing them with valuable guides and freebies. That’s when I realized that using a full-funnel approach was key to our success. Many current users were not aware of the real potential that our software could bring to their business. There was a huge untapped market we could attract instead of focusing mainly on the search and waiting for people to type the main keywords (which turned out to be extremely expensive). 
  • I researched their ideal customer profile, which birthed a new list of targeted customers, and, in turn, were segmented into different campaigns and ad groups. This is the best approach to keep your future analysis as clean as possible. If you mix different audiences into the same campaign, you will end up with data that is difficult to read. 
  • I also asked the client to generate new creatives to convey the real value of their product in a single image. This creative can be further reinforced with copywriting, including the product’s main benefits to the prospect. Most of my clients make the common mistake of writing the benefits they “think” are appealing to the user. However, most times, the benefits they perceive as valuable to the user are nowhere close to what users find as most valuable. Thanks to the initial market and user research, we were able to uncover what users truly valued via forums, comments, comparison pages, etc., and we turned this into benefits in our copy for the images.  
  • For the search campaigns, I started with a keyword research analysis. To control the spend, I applied audiences to the search campaign. For instance, I set up the ads to show only to those who were in-market for new software and had similar search patterns as other users in the construction industry.
  • I also conducted another keyword research down to the functionality level of the product. It turned out that users were searching for more than just “construction software,” which had a more informational intent and was very expensive. I developed new ad groups and campaigns targeting these features and applied audiences accordingly to manage the spend. I helped optimize all the landing pages to hit the highest possible Quality Score and built the ads to send people to all the relevant landing pages.

2

There was an instant decrease in the CPA. It happened during August, and the conversion rate followed. The client started seeing an increase in qualified leads from non-branded searches. This helped the account to scale. The CTR, too, saw an 8% increase. As we stepped into September, the conversion rate increased to 1.15% from 0.55%. We launched the display campaign in September after our search campaigns started bringing more qualified leads. Thanks to the excellent data and signals to optimize the account, the website saw a 1.19% conversion rate during October. This led to an impressive increase in non-branded conversions and cheap leads from our display campaigns. Our non-branded conversions now formed 80% of the bucket, and we were now paying ⅓ for them.

The Results

With the recommendations from the first audit and continuous action, the results: The Google Ads Conversion Rate doubled [X2] The non-branded Conversion increased by over 450% CTR improved by +150%.

0 X

The Google Ads Convertion Rate

+ 0 %

Non-Branded Conversion

+ 0 %

CTR

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