Google Adwords Case Study (not trying to sell a WSO with this one :)

background:
I manage automotive advertising accounts on a regional and local level. Paid search is probably about 40% of my total monthly billings. My average paid search campaign is 8-10k/mo in spend (includes a 35% management fee/margin)



typically when I build paid search campaigns, I use google keyword planner, plus historical data, to build out large campaigns.

I usually have separate segments for each make and model vehicle for my auto clients, so for example, a ford dealer would have its own segment for a ford fusion, ford f150, etc.., with its own 3 sets of ads, and a group of possibly around 60 keyword variations that I've found work well as a cookie cutter approach such as ford fusion sales, etc.

from there, I run it about a month and begin tweaking.


Recently I tested a lease pull ahead campaign that I built. However, I sourced the keywords in different way to spitball a theory with a guy I work with.

I went to google's search page, and used the autocomplete/predictive search to find all the different variants of lease pull ahead/early lease termination searches. Did it the hard way, with multiple searches, instead of using a search engine to find all versions for me. That is one way to automate this if you repeat it.

I had a small list, maybe 20 or so keywords. I polished the list after with variations of broad vs phrase matches, wrote some simple ad copy "AIDA" style, and then dropped them on a specially built lease landing page on the client's site, that lands on a lease terminaton "FAQ" type deal, and a form fill.

on average, most traditional auto searches see CTR around 2% in paid search campaigns that we work with.

In this new segment, by only using keywords I sourced from google's auto-complete, I was able to see a 5% CTR after only a week of testing, and a 8/10 quality score.


30 days later, Im at an 8% CTR, performance is consistently improving week over week.

thoughts, questions, comments?