PPC Case Study – Car Hauling Service
Our Client In A Nutshell…
This client provides door-to-door transportation of cars anywhere in the continental United States.
If you’re relocating, buying a car from out of state, or simply want to have your vehicle with you while you travel, they’ve your back.
The company is known for their ability to reliably transport cars in as little as two or three days by utilizing their fleet of enclosed hot-shot haulers. This is perfect for shipping your priceless classic car to the next car show, or making sure your McLaren 720S is waiting for your when you arrive at your vacation destination.
Those who simply need to get their family vehicle from point A to point B will want to consider an open carrier that transports as many as ten cars at a time. Open carriers are a budget friendly option with delivery time measured in weeks, not days.
Obstacles To Overcome
When this client first approached Centsible Clicks, they were hungry for growth and not sure of the next steps needed to achieve market dominance.
The good news was that they were already running PPC campaigns on their own and achieving moderately successful results.
It was obvious that this client’s customers were out there, searching for a way to transport their vehicles, but unfortunately they self-managed PPC campaigns weren’t optimized for efficiency so they couldn’t reach a large audience.
Inefficient campaigns keep profit margins tight and make scaling ad spend risky.
Why risky? There are operational costs involved with scaling a car transport business.
It’s not just hiring more staff. More cars to transport means more transport vehicles are required in their fleet. Expanding their fleet without a sustainable flow of new prospects would be disastrous for the company.
Strategy Session
After a strategy session with Centsible Clicks, the important numbers started to become a bit more clear, the obstacles holding them back began to reveal themselves, and a plan to achieve exponential growth started to take shape.
After analyzing the client’s PPC account, we calculated that they were spending their PPC budget to generate 75 new leads per month at a respectable cost per lead.
More importantly, we were able to determine the primary issues holding their accounts back:
- Their ads were not efficient. They were receiving clicks for unrelated search queries. Their ads were triggering for search results related to cars, but not necessarily to prospects searching for a way to transport a vehicle
- Their ads were generating sales for their least profitable services. Instead of raising awareness for their most lucrative services, the vast majority of sales from PPC clicks went towards services with very slim profit margins.
It was clear that in order to help them achieve market dominance, we needed to first reduce wasted ad spend. Then target prospects who would be interested in their more profitable services and be sure we had a system in place to educate customers about higher end services that were available.
Solving both of these problems would increase overall ROI and allow us to scale their PPC campaign reliably.
Applying A Censtible Strategy
With an objective problems to solve, we set some measurable goals for the account.
- Profit. We stop a campaign cold in its tracks if it wasn’t generating enough profit per vehicle transported. However, our goal was set much higher, at 3X the current profit amount. The only way to achieve this was to focus our efforts on their higher end services.
- Efficiency. We would achieve a better cost per lead by optimizing their ad accounts. We would try to achieve this by focusing first on keywords and later by creating a strategy to decrease clicks from prospects unable to require their high end services.
We began by optimizing keywords.
Google loves to spend your ad budget as quickly as possible. This means if you’re running ad campaigns yourself and you are a Google Ads or PPC expert, you’re likely to fall victim to wasted ad spend.
This is the exact scenario that they found themselves in when we began our process to optimize their account for efficiency.
Our process was simple on the surface, but requires great attention to detail:
- We added negative keywords to prevent ads from being triggered by search terms that didn’t show buying intent.
- We set budgets to dominate positions one and two of the SERPS for the highest performing keywords, while we also ruthlessly cut the budgets for underperforming keywords.
Discovering the profit.
Instead of merely relying on the data (which suggested which keywords or ads were most profitable) we applied our understanding of human psychology. We were able to discover a way to reach customers searching for the more lucrative services that they offered while still keeping CPA similar to targeting the lower priced prospects.
While we can’t give away our competitive edge in this case study, we can reveal a bit of our strategy.
We found that by targeting a position lower on the Google results page, certain keywords became massively more efficient and were attracting the right kind of buyer.
Why was that happening? Isn’t ranking #1 always better?
Well, in this case the wasted clicks were coming from people hurriedly clicking the first result on the page.
We wanted to reach more affluent customers to offer them high ticket services. By ranking lower in the results, it meant people needed to be thoughtful. We wanted clicks from people who were willing to read the results page in much more detail.
While this sort of strategy may seem unorthodox, it is exactly why companies rely on Centsible Clicks for customer acquisition. Data represents people. We follow the data so we can start to understand the wants, needs, and desires of your customers with great detail.
Result: Massive Growth
The results we achieved were phenomenal, by any standards.
Within 18 months, we achieved an average order profit more than 3X higher per vehicle transported than before. This increase represented a 286% percent gain in profit.
At the same time we increased profit, we were also able to reduce the cost per lead by 25.8%.
Most importantly, we were able to sustain these metrics as we increased their ad spend from their initial budget to over 20 times the amount of spend per month.
The end result is that the ads campaigns we manage for them generates 2,500 new leads for the company every month. It has allowed them to grow exponentially and dominate their market.
If you’re interested in achieving this sort of exponential growth for your company, scheduling a call with a Centsible Clicks team member today.
