Essential Italy

Why we like this Case Study

This case study illustrates how our professional, structured, and business-minded approach to PPC can, in just a few of months, drastically improve a client’s ROI by increasing conversion rates and lowering the average cost-per-conversion.

It also demonstrates how merely applying the fundamental principles of PPC can be extremely profitable – we are constantly amazed at how so many companies miss these basics and, consequently, are squandering their marketing budget.

The Client

Essential Italy provides high-quality hotel, villa and apartment accommodation in Italy.

Having been in the business for almost 10 years, they have been able to nurture a portfolio of sublime accommodation. Their properties are renowned for their idyllic locations, unparalleled comfort and convenience, and distinctive Italian quality.

Thanks to their highly-personalised, expert-driven service, Essential Italy is immensely popular with its clients and is a dominant player in the Italian holiday market. Whether you’re after a villa in Sardinia or a Puglia villa with pool, the Essential Italy brand is synonymous with quality.

The Challenge

Essential Italy approached LeadGeneratorsDigital as it needed to improve the metrics of its existing PPC campaign. Traffic and conversions were too low and costs too high. They needed a fresh way of approaching PPC, together with a more business minded campaign management strategy that would generate more sales for the business at a lower cost per sale.

This is a very common scenario and many clients have come to us with this exact problem. As we have vast experience turning lack lustre campaigns into success stories, we were delighted to take on this same challenge for Essential Italy.

How we Did It

Campaign Structure

We have found from experience that a clear, logical and structured re-organisation of the entire PPC campaign is usually the key ingredient for success when taking over a client’s existing campaign. Therefore, as we have done with so many of our clients, our first steps were to address the basic – yet oft-forgotten – principles of PPC management.

PPC is all about relevance, and in order to maximise relevance we re-organised all the key phrases into a much larger number of more focused and relevant groupings (Ad Groups).

While fairly simplistic in concept, this rather time-consuming task allowed us to adopt more of a guerrilla marketing approach, which then enabled us to create and associate highly targeted advertising messages (snippets) for each of these new and more targeted groupings.

This process alone has resulted in a huge boost in PPC metrics for many of our clients and we were pleased to see the same results for Essential Italy.

Reducing Google’s Budgetary Bleed

For the uninitiated (and sadly still for many PPC agencies), Google is a very dangerous predator which can, and often does, consume and waste a large percentage of a client’s PPC budget.

For this reason, we are extremely fastidious about putting in place a series of important tactics that we have mastered over time that vastly reduces this rather blatant budget bleed that so many PPC campaigns suffer from.

The first tactic is to invest much time into researching and building vast lists of negative phrases (key phrases an ad is ranked for but which don’t provide relevant traffic), by using the Google Keyword Planner and studying the Search Query reports on a very regular basis. Our negative lists are famous for their size – often comprising thousands of phrases!

Our next focus is that of correctly managing the different phrase match types. There are some very interesting theories about how to create a profitable mix of match types and, over the years, we have developed our own, rather unique, approach.

With these types of budget saving measures in place, we are often astounded by how much of our client’s budgets we are able to save and reinvest in the more profitable phrases.

Profit Centric Bidding Strategies

Many of our clients and competitors believe that getting as much traffic as possible is the main objective of any PPC campaign. However, while traffic is indeed important, our experience has taught us that the most important objective is to use our bidding strategy to achieve the right amount of traffic, at the right price, at the right cost-per-conversion. In our management of Essential Italy’s PPC campaign, therefore, we geared our strategy towards achieving higher profits rather than higher volumes of traffic.

One example of this strategic and profit centric approach was to reduce bidding levels on those phrases that generated high CTRs and traffic volumes but did not generate enough conversions, and to then divert these funds to better performing phrases.

By applying this strict performance based discipline to our bidding strategies, we were very quickly able to reign in the spend, while vastly increasing conversions and sales for our client.

The Results

Over the space of just two months, we were able to dramatically increase Essential Italy’s total conversion figures by a stunning 544%, while lowering their average cost-per-conversion from £50 each to £20 each (a very reasonable cost-per-acquisition for a PPC campaign in the travel industry).

We were therefore able to fulfil, and indeed, surpass their marketing objectives, by optimising their marketing spend and boosting their revenues.

We continued to manage Essential Italy’s profitable PPC campaign and, because of our success in this area, the client further retained us to manage an SEO campaign to supplement their online marketing efforts.

Looking to maximise your profits with PPC?

As an official Google Accredited Agency with over 15 years of experience with Paid Search across multiple search engines in both the UK, the USA and Europe, we are perfectly placed to boost your PPC results and help you improve sales and profits.

Give us a call to find out more.