Their PPC campaign had been through a number of different agencies to a number of different brands in their portfolio. They required a unified strategy to ensure that they were able to generate the highest possible number of applications by sending the most appropriate traffic to each area. They also needed to reduce the spiralling cost per conversion in an increasingly competitive market.

When we took over management of their PPC we began by conducting analysis of the different demographics of traffic that converted better at each site. We created several categories based on topic, intent, plurality, etc. We assigned each keyword the appropriate feature for each of these categories, and found the common features for keywords that converted better on each site.

When we re-developed the campaign, we did it on the basis of these results. We produced a much larger, more extensive campaign and sent each group to a landing page optimised for those keywords. We sent all traffic to the best converting site, and the dedicated landing pages based on the common features we’d previously identified ensured that site was optimised for the full breadth of the campaign.

We used tight match types without reliance on broad match. The scope of our campaign meant that every reasonable variation was included already. This meant that every search query performed could have a different bid based on its likelihood of conversion. We were able to be much more aggressive on the best terms as a result.

We took over the campaign at the start of 2009, and since then we have trebled the total conversion volumes and cut cost per conversion by 50%. This was as a result of careful analysis of conversion rates by keyword feature to ensure the best possible converting landing pages, and of the extreme breadth of the campaign to make sure that no traffic was missed.