Residential moving is a remarkably competitive field in online paid advertising. In New York City alone, there are more than two dozen advertisers competing for ad positions on the top of the first page of Google.
Additionally, because it is a competitive industry with many advertisers and relatively large transaction sizes, the cost-per-click for ads is high.
High cost per click numbers with strong competition meant that it would take really strong targeting and optimization in a short amount of time to build a profitable campaign before the cost of running a negative ROI campaign became too high.
Pay-per-click advertising gives the advertiser the ability to target as broadly or as targeted as desired. For brands with large budgets and longer time horizons, the top of the funnel can be addressed. In this case, Movers, Not Shakers had a limited advertising budget and needed to see tangible results quickly in order to justify the expense and increase budget, and wanted to see a profitable campaign in only a few months.
In order to achieve the audacious goals of Movers, Not Shakers, we chose to use these PPC tactics:
Building a hyper targeted campaign was a necessity in order to keep spend down while optimizing toward profitability. Since local moves in Brooklyn and New York City were the core of Movers, Not Shakers business, we built a search campaign that targeted only Brooklyn and New York moving searches from zip codes within the city.
Click-through-rate is a large component of quality score, and quality score plays a significant role in what an ad’s cost-per-click is; therefore, we focused on creating incredibly engaging and relevant ads to maximize CTR thereby boosting quality score and reducing CPC.
Finally, Movers, Not Shakers had an estimate page that converted very well, but was generic and did not contain the content necessary to serve as a satisfactory landing page for paid campaigns. To correct this, we added relevant content and improved the layout and structure of the page to load more quickly, and be more relevant. This resulted in a 109% jump in conversion rate.
The campaign was breaking even after 30 days and was profitable after 60. After 22 months of refinement, the ROI 155% and climbing. In addition, the modifications to the landing pages raised conversion rates by 109.03% from 18.72% to 39.13%.
