Lemay Barbers, a local barbershop located in Fort Collins, CO, was struggling to scale the performance of their paid advertising through Google Ads despite the platform reporting high-performance during the slowest weeks.
Challenges
- After completing an audit of Lemay Barber’s Google Ads account, Imprint Digital identified key factors leading to poor performance. These are the key factors identified:
- The use of Google Ads “Smart Campaigns”.
- Google’s Smart Campaigns offer business owners an easy and fast solution to creating their first paid advertising campaigns. While these campaigns are helpful and effective as a temporary solution, these campaigns are unable to provide intermediate-to-advanced users of Google Ads the data, control, and customization necessary to scale digital marketing efforts cost-effectively.
- Lack of proper conversion tracking
- Automated bid strategies, like the bid strategy used in Lemay Barber’s smart campaigns, can be extremely powerful in the hands of a competent digital marketer if the account is accurately measuring conversion actions we deem as “the goal” for our campaigns. In the case of Lemay Barber’s Google Ads account, conversion goals were improperly instituted. This led to a continual decline in performance over the years.
- Ineffective campaign structures
- The organization of a Google Ads account can make or break the long-term scalability of the account. “An ounce of
prevention[organization in the beginning] is worth a pound ofcure[detangling in the future]”. Imprint Digital organized Lemay Barber’s Google Ads campaigns and ad groups by goals; creating segments that allow for dynamic budget allocation far into the future
- The organization of a Google Ads account can make or break the long-term scalability of the account. “An ounce of
- The use of Google Ads “Smart Campaigns”.
Lemay Barbers could feel a lack of performance coming from their Google Ads campaigns despite the platform reporting record-high conversions.
After an initial audit, the reported conversions were determined to be conversions Lemay Barbers deemed as unimportant (clicks to their website, engagements on the Google Business Profile, etc.).
Along the way, Imprint Digital identified additional opportunities but before we could start creating new campaigns, we would need a plan that would allow us to measure correctly and scale effortlessly.
So we made one.
Objectives
- Project Goals:
- Configure conversion actions
- Segment campaign goals with cost-effectiveness in mind.
- Build campaigns to emphasize conversion actions we actually care about.
- Generate initial conversion data via manual bidding strategies
- Once we generated results from manual bidding strategies, upgrade to Google Ads automated-bidding strategies
- Get more customers in the door.
Approach & Strategy
- Development: build and integrate a tracking environment for organic and paid ads channels.
- Paid Ads
- Determine a cost-effective radius for geographic targeting
- Identify the best and worst performing keywords
- Scale budget
- Execution Plan:
- Create Google Search Console account (GSC) – While this platform is designed to measure and optimize organic traffic, an intelligent Digital Marketer will use the data from GSC to inform the design and structure of a paid advertising campaigns.
- Update and improve the Google Analytic (GA4) account – This platform provides data from your website across all traffic channels (paid, organic, social, direct, etc).
- Configure conversion actions in Google Ads
- Design a scalable campaign structure that Lemay Barbers can easily understand and manage
- Measure, adjust, optimize
Results
- Conversion Rate – increased by 98.42% (39.66% vs 19.99%)
- Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – increased by 51.23% (10.22 vs 6.76%)
- Conversion Action “Book Appointment” – increased by 35,750% (to be fair, this account was unable to measure this conversion action prior to working with Imprint Digital. Today, Lemay Barbers is now accurately tracking and optimizing for actions like these).
- Website Traffic increased by 152.33%
- Paid Ads traffic decreased by 59.14% (less volume, higher quality)
- Website Engagement Rate* increased by 110.31% (93.61% vs 44.51%)
- Website Traffic increased by 152.33%
- Paid Ads engagement rate* increased by 113.63% (94.76% vs 44.36%).
*engagement rate helps you measure the percentage of visits to your website or app that involved some form of meaningful engagement. – Google Analytics Help Center
Where We Are Today
The good news is that the shop is now busier than ever and the ad account is providing actionable data.
The bad news is that the shop is now so busy, Dustin has to schedule his haircuts 1 month in advance…