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A local faith-based medical facility was looking for new patients amidst the COVID pandemic. For years, Aztek put forth strenuous efforts (and a hefty budget) to build awareness around their spine & orthopedic, bariatric, and addiction services. However, in 2020 there was a clear need to transition the goal and focus away from awareness and more towards conversions and lead generation.
Because their budget was nearly $30,000 a month, this transition was going to be quite the overhaul that required a separate strategy. Luckily, it significantly paid off for the client.
Programmatic ad platforms like Choozle can be a very valuable tool when it comes to building awareness. Programmatic ads allow you to showcase banner ads to your ideal target audience. If the graphic is compelling enough, the end-user will engage with the ad and end up on a custom landing page to get more information. However, users that were getting served banner ads were nowhere near ready to convert – even with creative graphics and a thoughtful landing page – because it was likely their very first interaction with the brand or service.
This logic made us immediately determine that the $3,000 per month investment would be better served on an intent-based platform like Google Ads. So, we decided to stop advertising on a programmatic ad platform and re-invest into Google Search Ads.
When optimizing Google Ads, there are a few different approaches you can take. The optimization could include pausing keywords that are spending too much and underperforming, or refreshing the ad copy, or adjusting the ad copy, etc.
Since we were completely changing the strategy, this required a thorough audit which led us to optimize and restructuring all of our ad campaigns. In particular, we conducted the following updates:
Ad Landing Pages
Since we focused on brand awareness for multiple years, a good portion of the ad campaigns were pointing towards general website pages. A custom ad landing page can not only help increase conversions but is also a deciding factor for Google that can determine how often or where your ad is placed. With this in mind, it was clear that we needed to build custom ad landing pages for each campaign that naturally incorporated the keywords within the ad group and ad copy.
Phone Number Extensions
After conducting the audit, it was apparent that not all ad groups had phone number extensions. So, we decided to add phone number extensions to every ad and saw a significant impact in conversion results.
Ad Copy Refresh
Over the years, the client’s services expanded and became much more comprehensive. We went through each ad variation to ensure that the copy was compelling and creative and reflected the updated services.
Keyword Refresh
As we were optimizing ads, refreshing the keywords was KEY. We paused keywords that were no longer relevant, added negative keywords/queries that we're straying too far from the keyword that we were bidding on, and added new keywords that we thought would have strategic intent or high volume and low competition. This refresh was the foundation of the success we experienced.
Refined Audiences
After interviewing the client, we found that that there was an opportunity to update the demographic and geographic target audience. We spent time refining the audience and focus areas that we wanted to advertise to.
Of all the advertisement platforms that the client invested in, Google Search played a pivotal role in the transition from awareness to lead generation.
Transitioning from awareness to conversions required us to completely reframe the content and create new, customized graphics. But before we started to re-build the ads, we needed to refine the strategy and the audience. Historically, the client wanted to advertise all services and a good handful of their physicians. We noticed that they previously did not have a significant amount of traffic or conversions because the net was cast too wide, meaning that their $6,000 budget was stretched too thin.
To fix this, we started with rebuilding the strategy and identifying the services that performed well in the past as well as what the client wanted to focus on. We also suggested that they limit the number of physicians that are being advertised at once. Therefore, limiting the creative variations from roughly 13 to 3 per month. We tested this theory and strategy for about 3-4 months and found that it was successful both from a website traffic and conversion standpoint.
Next, we focused on refining the audience and discovered that some of the newer physicians required custom audiences. With fluent Facebook updates, we were able to identify even more interests that we could add to previously saved audiences. This allowed us to better target our audience.
Finally, we worked with our client to produce new ad copy and graphics that were more relevant to our new lead-gen strategy.
For call tracking, our client was using CallRail. Historically, custom numbers were created based on the ad campaign. While this is great for call reporting clarification purposes, it can be quite costly. The way CallRail works is that clients must pay a cost per phone number and per minute, which can add up quickly. When we made the transition, we made cleaning up their CallRail number structure a priority. Instead of purchasing one number per campaign, we leveraged the platform's workflow capabilities to help condense the number of phone numbers that they needed to purchase.
Instead of buying one keyword per campaign, we invested in a couple of different rotating keyword pools, saving the client money and leading to much easier reporting for the client.
Despite the uncertainties and even a reduced budget in the midst of COVID-19, the lead-generation strategy and optimization initiatives led to a 60% increase in conversions from the previous year.
Need help developing a digital marketing strategy or resources for implementing the next steps? The digital marketing team at Aztek is here to help. Contact us today to discuss our digital marketing services.
