Capping your PPC budget has risks - your ads stop appearing because you have spent your allocated budget while your audience is still searching for you.
ClickThrough recently developed a PPC forecasting tool to show clients how they could enjoy better ROI by increasing paid search budgets. In this case study, we explain how the tool helped Cover My Cab increase conversions by 25% with a change that took a matter of minutes…
Cover My Cab has more than 30 years’ experience providing specialist insurance products to taxi drivers, fleet owners and taxi operators. The brand is part of J&M Insurance, a ‘business-to-business’ insurance firm that has served the taxi industry for longer than any other specialist broker.
ClickThrough Marketing began working with Cover My Cab in April 2014, helping to manage and optimise its PPC campaigns.
After four months working on Cover My Cab’s paid search campaigns, results were good. However, ClickThrough suspected more gains could be made by opening budget caps and opting for an ‘always on’ PPC strategy, rather than capping spend at a certain level.
Ian Boyden, paid search manager, says:
“The risk with capping your spend is that you could ‘go dark’ too early in the day. In other words, your ads stop appearing because you’ve spent your allocated budget, but your audience may well still be searching for your services.
“You might even find that you’re missing out on peak search activity by capping budgets.”
Paid search executive Dave Earnshaw used a proprietary forecasting tool – developed in-house by Ian Boyden – to perform a deep-dive analysis of Cover My Cab’s AdWords account.
The tool showed that the account had around 5% impression share lost to budget in August 2014. It forecasted that, if budget caps were removed so there were no impressions lost to budget, Cover My Cab could have spent approximately 11% more and seen conversions increase by 11% also.
Because the spend increase would come from increasing budget caps rather than a CPC push, Cover My Cab would not pay any more per click – as they would if they were jostling for higher positions. Ian’s tool showed simply and effectively how gains could be made by raising budget – a change that could be carried out in minutes, with no additional bid management or optimisation.
Dave said:
“This might sound like a simple thing, but many clients we take on have a limited budget and are worried about overspending. Ian created this tool to show clients in a clear and simple way how they could improve ROI without the risk of wasting budget on clicks.”
ClickThrough presented the findings to Cover My Cab, which agreed to raise budgets for the following month.
In September, Cover My Cab spent 24% more on clicks, and saw conversions increase by 25%.
The firm also enjoyed a 23% increase in clicks, month on month.
Ian said:
“The next time you see impressions lost to budget, we recommend opening up the budget as you may be restricting additional volume of traffic and conversions.
“We recommend an ‘always on’ strategy with PPC, and if you find your account is spending too much then you should reduce CPCs until you see spend hit your target.”