Search engine marketing for small business case study.
How we tripled Reaction's monthly site traffic through Google Ads, without increasing their paid search engine marketing spend.
The brief
Our brief for Reaction was to drive high quality traffic to site, as cost-efficiently as possible, in order to build the brand during key moments in the news cycle. Although they were already using Google Ads, they believed there was more that could be done to improve their search engine marketing performance, but they weren't sure what the best course of action would be.
The client had already been using Google Ads in house for their search engine marketing, however with limited knowledge surrounding the platform they were left feeling lost, and had seen performance gradually decline in the months prior to us taking over the account. As a small business, their paid search advertising budget was limited and they wanted to get more out of their current level of monthly spend, rather than increasing it.
What we delivered
We developed a suite of creatives and ad copy which were rolled out on Google's Performance Max campaign type. This allowed us to maximise reach across YouTube, Gmail, Display and Search, with visual ads that showed in a range of formats. The strategy in using Performance Max rather than traditional search was to exceed their previous coverage, as we were now gaining impressions across channels outside of just Google Search on a far wider scale.
We also created a bespoke set of custom audiences to target, increasing the relevance of our activity. This included a news-focused audience as well as an audience that targeted users who had recently visited their competitor's websites. Whilst most marketers heavily rely on keywords when setting up search engine marketing campaigns, audiences should also be a key element within the marketing strategy.
This approach tied together wide targeting using Google's Performance Max placements, along with more specific audience targeting to make sure we were keeping relevance high. To the right you can see some examples of how these ads appeared within Google's various placements.
What were the results?
We quickly started to see a big improvement in our client's search engine marketing performance. Impressions increased x10, as result of the wider reach the Performance Max format provided. This helped to get the client's brand in front of more users, a key driver of brand awareness.
The custom built audiences both showed strong engagement, with a click through rate above the industry standard for Performance Max. As a result of this, traffic to site driven through search engine marketing increased by over 300% in the first month, despite no increase in the Google Ads spend. This shows the power of an effective search engine marketing campaign, looking beyond standard search ads and testing Google's updated formats to get the best results possible for your business.
We also work across search engine marketing, small business branding, website design and more. Take a look through some more case studies to get a better idea of how we do things.
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