Around mid-December, we had a new client reach out to us – Blackford Centre. Blackford Centre is a company that offers Distance Learning Courses for people all over the world.
Introduction
Around mid-December, we had a new client reach out to us – Blackford Centre. Blackford Centre is a company that offers Distance Learning Courses for people all over the world. Some countries they are available in include the US, Canada, the UK, Spain, Ireland, South Africa, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and many more.
They have courses in just about any subject you can imagine, and these range from Animal Care and Creative Writing, to Digital Marketing and Child Psychology. The best part is that these courses can be taken anywhere at any time, and there are no required exams. Once you finish the course, you’re considered qualified and can begin your path onto a new career or hobby. You can take the courses as slowly or as quickly as you desire, and there’s no need to worry about how well you’ll do on any of it since there is no testing of any sort.
It’s the perfect solution for anyone who wishes to increase their education in a subject but doesn’t have time or money to spend in a classroom. Some of the subjects that are covered are also difficult to find anywhere else. It’s also great for those with busy schedules and the individuals who have bad testing anxiety.
This company has lots to offer the world, but they can’t do that successfully if they don’t have the right marketing capabilities to get the visibility and conversion rates they need. That’s where we come in to help.
Client Objective
Once we spoke with our new client, we were able to come with 3 solid objectives to work toward together.
The first was to check the conversion tracking codes. The client was concerned that they were either not working for them or possibly not even on the website at all. Whichever way the case, we would get it fixed.
Secondly, they wanted Ad Extensions added to their campaigns, and they wanted them as relevant as possible. Ad Extensions are a great addition to any website as they boost activity and clicks.
Lastly, they wanted us to check each bidding strategy for each one of their campaigns to reduce the CPC as it was currently. This would be the most laborious of the objectives considering that they had over 40 campaigns going.
Before we could officially get started, we needed to get an idea of just how the company was doing with their website and ad campaigns. We needed to figure out what was going on behind the scenes, and that’s where we get into the client’s performance overview.
Client’s Performance Overview
In December of 2019, we started the project. We were given permission and access to check the client’s accounts, and once in, we started noticing problems right away.
The first issue that grabbed our attention was that his Google Global Site Tag had been inserted multiple times, making all of the ad conversion tracking completely inaccurate and wrong. We definitely needed to go in and fix this right away in order to be able to get any concrete data.
Next, we noticed that most of the Ad Extensions were actually missing. Extensions like Call Out and Structured Snippet weren’t even showing up. In some of the site link extensions, there wasn’t even a description to go with it. This was going to have to be fixed as well in order for all of the functionalities to work.
Another observation we made was that some of the campaigns had the wrong settings inputted, which was causing CPC prices to skyrocket. What had happened was the settings were set to Manual CPC Bidding Strategy, and what it should’ve been was Maximize Bidding Strategy in order to get the most for their money.
Strategy
Now that we knew all of the problems that we were up against, it was time to develop a strategy. The first thing we needed to do was to audit the website and take some time just to monitor what was going on. We wanted to be sure we knew exactly what was happening before we began making changes.
Maintaining an awareness of our client’s objectives, we checked all of their pages. Most of them did not have the proper conversion tracking code that is so crucially needed. Some of them even had duplicate tracking codes, which completely messed up the data collected. Others contained no Event Snippet. There were even pages that couldn’t be opened properly because the link was broken and no longer worked.
We discussed all of this with the client so that they were aware of the entire process, and they agreed with the next steps that we suggested. Because many of the webpages didn’t have Google Conversion Codes, we set it up for them and had them install it through their own developer.
The next step was to add the proper Ad Extensions that were much needed in the website’s ad copy. We added Structured Snippets and Call Out Extensions. In the Sitelink Extensions that were already there, we added descriptions to make them worth their value. If you’d like to see these Ad Extensions for yourself, you can check them out here
As we discussed before, some of the ad campaigns had the wrong type of Bidding Strategy for them. Many of them needed to be changed out of the manual setting and made to maximize conversion instead. In other ad campaigns, the situation was the opposite and the bidding strategy needed to be reversed. For these, our goal with this was to lower the CPC.
In a few of the campaigns though, we did something a little different. We recommended that the client change the bidding strategy from Manual CPC to Target CPC for a period of time to get the ball rolling and start seeing more conversions.
Results
The client readily took all of our suggestions and recommendations, and because of that, they began to flourish. Their ad campaign was officially optimized appropriately, leading to much-improved performance.
The client’s website now had all the Conversion Tracking Codes where they needed to be on the web pages in order for them to work properly, leaving our client happy with the product. The conversion tracking was working much better now, and you can see it all for yourself here
We also added relevant Ad Extensions such as Call Out, Structured Snippet, and Site Link, which helped boost their ad performance. With all of this done, we quickly began seeing positive results.
Within just 20 days (not even a full month!) we were able to increase our client’s conversions by 151.73% and reduce the CPC by -69.47%. That’s a huge difference! To compare previous performance from mid-December until now, Just see the numbers for yourself.
Satisfied with a job well done by meeting all the objectives, our client was happy and successful from there on out.
Target Country
UK, USA, Spain, India, South Africa, Canada, Nigeria and many more
