One of my clients had a minimal budget for their digital marketing, resulting in very strict rules being applied to their Google Ads campaign optimisation strategy. They previously worked with an agency who did minimal setup and no conversion/ goal tracking, resulting in extremely poor (or little to none) optimisations and a high cost-per-click of around $5.20/ click across a very small set of broad match keywords.

As to not go over budget, daily caps were put in place alongside a highly detailed and structured account setup which allowed for varying types of ad-formats and keyword categories to be controlled. The core focus of the account was to increase awareness based on user intent and minimise cost wherever possible whilst scaling performance.

The highly segmented account structure allowed me to pivot budget in areas of growth and opportunity, focusing on long-tail keyword performance and keyword to landing page quality score. As I was also managing the clients website, I was able to update content and keywords accordingly which fed into a much larger SEO strategy. As a result, I achieved high impression shares on ads with the overall click-through-rate (CTR%) peaking at 6.32% and a conversion rate of 35% to lead (via tracked calls or contact form submissions). CPC decreased by 46% as a result, averaging around $2.81/ click.

This was maintained and scaled alongside SEO keyword performance in organic search, which ultimately resulted in a reduced ad-spend working in their favour as they ranked organically for many generic search terms in the top 5 search results naturally, meaning budget could go towards more competitive areas of paid advertising to scale brand awareness and bring in new leads.