Case Study
Overcoming a Smaller Budget and Tough Economy to Find Great Leads
The Story
A regional custom home builder client was heavily impacted by the economy, supply chain shortages associated with the pandemic, labor shortages, and the high cost of building materials. As a result, they needed to raise prices and reduce their marketing budget to remain profitable and weather the uncertainty.
Workshop Digital was tasked with increasing qualified new home construction leads year-over-year while targeting a low cost per conversion to stay within the tighter marketing budget. To add to this challenge, we needed to account for fluctuations in the market and our client’s ability to build homes when developing monthly ad spends throughout the year.
The Approach
Thanks to our close working relationship with the client, we were able to identify solutions that would both fit their new budget and still be most effective in solving those issues impacting their business. We completed a competitor analysis to assess spending and messaging across their industry – this helped identify where the client would most likely have success to get more engagement without overspending. By planning for and reacting quickly to changes in the industry, we helped the client spend larger portions of their budget at optimal times to get the most from their ad dollars.
The program consisted of three Google Ads Search Campaigns:
Branded
Non-Branded
Competitors
We used Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) and Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) to maximize creative visibility. From there, we consolidated the Non-Branded ad groups to improve efficiency and clean up the most popular location-based ad copy. Testing identified the best areas of opportunity, including a DSA ad group targeting a House Plans section of the website.
We targeted a list of established audiences and set up remarketing campaigns to email lists for each. The audience was generated through the Observation target setting, identifying keywords through keyword and trend research, as well as with input from the client.
The Results
Workshop Digital achieved the desired cost per lead while still delivering the same number of conversions as the previous year, all during a very hectic period for this industry. We were also able to improve the quality of these campaigns within a modest budget to follow the 105% increase in conversions and 34% decrease in CPL in 2020.
Ongoing testing and improvements to landing pages have benefited paid ads, along with bidding improvements and adding new high-value keywords throughout the year, to help conversion rates on those ads improve 41% YoY. Increased budgets at key times allowed Workshop Digital to test where the client would see the great return on their advertising investment. These budget increases did, in fact, generate more leads,and highlighted the high search volume around keywords identified by our earlier research. During this time we were also able to identify the best possible window for cost per lead to avoid diminishing marginal returns.
Developing a dedicated strategy to solve these issues while also conducting our annual planning was a key part of the success of this campaign. Working closely with our client, Workshop Digital Paid Media specialists were able to better understand the nature of the pandemic’s impact on their industry so that we could find the best digital marketing plan to achieve their goals.
