Inter-agency collaboration saves Arden University £5.4k in monthly media spend

Find out how our organic search team collaborated with another agency to save Arden University £5,400 in monthly PPC spend.

We’d been working with Arden University to strengthen their organic visibility, while they were simultaneously partnered with an alternate agency for their paid activity. Though integration is most simple when all channels are unified under one roof, it is equally essential to work with any other marketing agencies our clients are partnered with, in order to achieve the best results possible, for everyone involved.

The challenge

Our challenge was that we’d seen consistently low levels of organic traffic on Arden's brand terms throughout 2022. This was impacting our overall organic performance on the account, despite great visibility on these keywords, suggesting that users were simply not engaging with the organic results.

Though we’d identified that this issue likely stemmed from paid search ads appearing for branded terms, we needed to work with our paid search counterparts to rectify performance from both sides (aiming for better traffic for us, and lower costs for them), something we were able to do after working closely in partnership and building that mutual trust.

The solution

After joining together to agree on this strategy change, Arden's paid search agency identified which keywords competitors were bidding on. This would ensure that Arden were not paying for traffic that they could get organically, at no cost.

Though they were still bidding 5% of the time, being able to pull back on paid search for 95% of these terms immediately secured improvements for both agencies, in organic traffic and media spend.

The results

The immediate results were;

• +16% organic traffic (and no loss overall)
• £5,400 saved in monthly paid media spend
• Absolutely zero loss in conversions as a result.

This was achieved purely from not paying for clicks they were able to get for free.

This wouldn't have been immediately visible for our counterparts working on PPC as, as far as they knew, they were getting great click-through rates on their ads. With us feeling able to flag suspected barriers, and their working with us to test our suspicions, we created a win-win-win situation together - proving that your agencies must be working collaboratively to achieve the results you deserve.

These results continued into January with, to date, a traffic increase of 80% YoY for ‘Distance Learning’ keywords. The end result – great performance, for less media cost.

Talk to us about how we can help you get more traffic, for less cost, from your search strategy.

Photo by Surface on Unsplash