We live in a world where we’re constantly connected. The average U.S. consumer spends 60 hours a week consuming content across devices, according to Nielsen. Americans own four digital devices on average! It’s kind of sad, but it’s our reality, so we must embrace it, right?
Any intellectual business owner is keenly aware that in order to survive and thrive as a company you need a robust digital marketing team to build a strong online presence. This is often easier said than done. Marketeering Group was born in 2011 to help business owners with this online marketing dilemma. From the mom and pop neighborhood pizza joints to the large corporate machines, they serve clients of all different shapes and sizes, helping them run their digital efforts from social media strategy to multimedia production.
Marketeering Group photo. Aside from the Seahawks banner, they look great!
For quite some time, the Seattle-based business steered clear of PPC due to a lack of time, knowledge, and resources – until they realized this was no longer feasible. Clients kept asking them for help with paid advertising, and employees felt their shoulders tense up when they couldn’t provide the services. Marketeering Group prides themselves on doing it all, so they knew they had to address this weak spot with a time-efficient solution.
“Everything is done in house, which makes for a hectic work environment, but means we can serve almost any need a small business may have under the same contract with our existing resources,” says Lead Marketing Strategist Michael Quayle. “This is important to our branding and a big reason we needed a simple and effective model like WordStream to launch our new PPC department.”
Now let’s dive into the 7 ways WordStream enabled this bootstrapped marketing firm to take on paid search as yet another channel to help their clients grow and succeed online.
#1: WordStream’s Time-Saving Tools Made it Possible to Add PPC as an Offering for Clients
Marketeering Group falls into the startup pool with its launch in 2011, making it even more challenging to serve clients with limited bandwidth. Luckily, their diverse specialization and collaboration across their staff makes it a bit easier to juggle multiple clients with varying needs, but when breaking into the world of paid search, Michael knew he needed to find a way to make it work in a timely and effective manner.
“We actually weren’t sure what to do about PPC before we got WordStream,” says Michael. “There was no way we would have the time to launch a reasonable PPC campaign, and early attempts had failed. PPC just took too much time, nobody knew how to set up a proper landing page, and we considered looking at firms to send our paid business. WordStream changed all this because it gave us the ability to manage what’s become hundreds of accounts with only a few staff.”
From time-saving tools like the 20-minute work week to easy-to-create reports and PPC landing pages, WordStream’s PPC Advisor has made it plausible for Marketeering Group to stay competitive and keep their clients happy by offering paid search as another channel to grow.
#2: Cost-Cutting Tools Reduce Client Budgets While Improving Results
The main reason many clients turn to Marketeering Group for PPC is to gain better results. Luckily, WordStream’s optimization tools enabled them to provide that for their clients, which helps to extend the lifetime value of each customer. If results are coming in, why would they leave?
Improvements in client Quality Scores helped cut costs by 20% per month for several clients, according to Michael. “At least four clients came to us asking if we could cut their PPC budget because it was becoming too much of a financial drain,” he says. “Using WordStream, we cut one client’s PPC budget in half while CTR (click-through-rate) went up 15%.”
What tools allowed Michael to do so? Weekly optimizations like the Review Costly Keywords tool, the Pause Duplicates and Add Negatives alerts helped PPC staff declutter the junk and focus on keywords that work for each client. Michael also found use in the ability to easily cut down large ad groups into more specific ones, increasing relevancy and CTR, which of course are two of the main factors that impact Quality Score. With a higher Quality Score comes a discounted cost, so it’s a win-win for the client and for the agency.
“Through a combination of WordStream tools we were able to simulate an aggressive corporate bidding strategy that our client went nuts over,” says Michael. “We’ve already received two additional referrals from him because of the project.”
#3: Collaborative Tools Allow Different Departments to Work on the Same Account
Marketeering Group’s office culture is fast-paced and collaborative, and in order to take each account’s PPC to the level of success the client is looking for, more than one eye on an account is often necessary.
“One of the greatest things about WordStream for our staff is how easily different departments can jump in and resume work on the same account,” says Michael. “Most people have to train while doing real client work so we often have new PPC employees who just completed training work in the 20-minute work week handling one account per week.”
To get the results clients want, Michael also has found it necessary to have a senior consultant on each account to regularly adjust bids and optimize keywords within the Manage PPC section of the platform.
WordStream makes it easy for you to add as many users as you’d like and even assign users to specific accounts with no additional charge. This is super beneficial for companies that operate on a similar agency-type model to Marketeering Groups.
Within Account Settings you can choose to associate specific client profiles to specific employees.
#4: WordStream’s “Paid and Organic Queries” Report Improves Client Results
This relatively new report in the WordStream software was added to give clients the ability to see which keywords are working not only for paid searches, but for organic queries as well. Why is this information helpful? There are several reasons, but one of the most obvious is that there are likely keywords you’re appearing for organically, which you should also be bidding on to get the maximum exposure possible (if your competitors are bidding on them, you’re going to lose ranking and visibility).
Oddly enough, Michael had a client that wanted to avoid bidding on organic queries his ads are appearing for. “One big issue we had was a client complaining that he was ‘sick of bidding on keywords he already ranked for in SEO,’ more or less. He was adamant that, despite the benefits of ranking in both organic and paid, he only wanted one,” says Michael. “We had done the same thing a few years ago and it took hours to track down the ranking. I was not looking forward to it until our Customer Service Rep showed us this tool. It literally saved one of our accounts.”
Michael has also found this feature helpful to prioritize bidding to get more total visibility on successful organic queries, match ad copy with organic listings that have high click-through-rates, and run experiments to test different copy and meta descriptions against others to improve CTR.
#5: WordStream’s Landing Page Creator Increases Conversions by 7%
One of the biggest reasons advertisers are failing with paid search is because their landing pages, well, suck. It’s a difficult reality to face, but when businesses address it and implement new pages, they can turn a failing account around and increase conversions by substantial amounts.
The problem is that creating new landing pages is not an easy task. This is why we developed our Landing Page Creator at WordStream, and Marketeering Group has found the tool to be insanely impactful for several of his clients.
“The Landing Pages tool has been incredible. Right after we started using WordStream, one of our clients was complaining about steadily losing rankings, for what turned out to be hundreds of spammy indexed landing pages that did well in PPC, but were tanking in SEO,” says Michael. “No-indexing the pages didn’t have enough impact, but fortunately we were able to re-create almost all of them in WordStream within a couple days. Now all of his landing pages are run entirely through WordStream, we have much deeper data than before, his SEO has recovered, and his paid conversion rate has gone up 7%.”
#6: Reporting Tools Deliver On-Demand Reports to Clients
Every agency understands the value of reporting results to clients at a moment’s notice. Unfortunately the process of gathering client data into neat, easy-to-understand, and visually intriguing reports, is numbingly time-consuming, and results are usually not as pretty as one envisioned.
WordStream’s Success Report has taken the headache out of reporting with its visually engaging, automatically generated monthly report to show clients where they’re succeeding and where there’s room for growth and change.
“We love the ability to simply send clients reporting URLs on demand that they can interact with, rather than clunky PDFs or text files,” says Michael. “That’s not only saved us time in reporting, but also pointed us in the direction our reporting should take. There’s virtually no administrative work, and that’s pretty rare in the tool world.”
#7: Customer Success Team Takes Support to the Next Level
Lastly, as great as tools can be, learning a new toolset, as well as the ins and outs of paid search, is a lot more complicated then it appears on the surface. This is why a strong support team is so important at any SaaS company, and fortunately WordStream’s support team is phenomenal.
“Our Customer Success Representatives have been outstanding, primarily because they eliminate the need to do any training,” says Michael. “Following my training sessions, my dedicated specialist, Katie Lyons, was more than happy to walk additional team members through the same sessions, something I didn’t expect and intended to do myself. Some of the team members that did the training session separately came back with different insights into how we should use the tool as well, so this became an essential learning experience for all of us.”
Aside from training, the support from the Customer Success Team has empowered Michael’s team to take on more advanced paid search tactics for their clients.
“Now we have a separate and fully functional PPC department moving past WordStream and into display and retargeting ads (using what’s we’ve learned from the tool),” says Michael. “We have the confidence that is anything goes wrong, there’s always the customer service backup plan who have answered dozens of questions, even when it’s our lack of experience, not a tool issue.”
About the Author:
Margot is a Content Marketing Specialist at WordStream with a background in PPC, SEM, content and digital marketing. Margot is passionate about writing and is also a regular contributor to Search Engine Journal and socialmediatoday.com. She enjoys running and eating ice cream during her free time (not simultaneous although that would be impressive). Follow her on:
Twitter: @ChappyMargot
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LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/margotdacunha