FindsYou approached Digital Clarity wishing to explore the possibilities of using Pay Per Click advertising to generate brand awareness and conversions on the FindsYouCars consumer website within a strict CPA.

Digital Clarity have been running the PPC for FindsYouCars for over 2 years and this case study looks at the successes and challenges of using search marketing strategies to generate cost effective results. The goals of the project were:

1. Initially build awareness of FindsYou.com for their automotive offering. The site was later launched as FindsYouCars.com
2. To educate people about what Findsyou is.
3. To drive users to post notices (leads) about the Cars they are looking to purchase.
4. To work towards generating leads within a specific CPA target

Strategy

Multiple campaigns were set up for the large number of car dealerships available. The makes and models were initially based on contracts FindsYou had in place with current Dealers. Budgets were then allocated accordingly to achieve conversions.

Campaigns included:

• Find a Car (generic terms)
• BMW
• Audi
• Ford
• Honda

*This is just a snapshot of campaigns.

It was clear that a huge volume of negative terms would need to be added in order to prevent irrelevant traffic such as;

• Reviews
• Parts
• Accessories
• Hire

The key to success as with all PPC campaigns is ensuring the keywords were relevant to the ad copy, the ad copy were reflecting the keywords as well as the landing pages being highly relevant.

One of the key messages was the ‘Free Buyer Service which carries out all the car searching for you’. As this is a new brand, service and website, it proved to be a challenge to relay this message simply and effectively to potential users.

Several ad copy variations were run and tested to identify which wording was engaging users to post ‘wants’.A clear winner was identifies after some time and variation of this have gradually been developed to improve CTR and conversions further.

Initial Results

After allowing the previously mentioned campaigns to run for a period of time, it was clear that we needed to make several optimisation changes in order to achieve the primary goal of the campaign; to generate conversions with a desired CPA target.

The strongest performing groups in terms of conversions was the ‘Find a car’ campaign, generating the lowest CPA out of all the campaigns. As expected the CPA was the highest on the ‘Generic cars’ campaign, whilst the different dealership campaigns varied.

The initial findings lead us to implement some analytics tracking in order to monitor which posts came from the model keywords and if ’used BMW’ lead to a used BMW post on the site.

Challenges

One of the main challenges Digital Clarity found was that the service we were advertising was brand new, therefore it was difficult to relay this to people in just 95 characters on Google. Despite this, clear and effective ad copy was written which conveyed the service precisely and as a result gained interest from people.

The car industry is huge, consequently there is a vast amount of search volumes on Google. With the restricted budget from the start up company at the time, Digital Clarity had to manage the best solution for this to ensure the required results were generated.

Following on from this, Digital Clarity had to place several strategies such as budget and Cost Per Click strategies in order to achieve there desired goals. This proved to be a difficult challenge as certain keywords performed stronger on certain CPC’s.

Final Results

After the planned 3 months of activity Digital Clarity had achieved the following:

• Visits from month 1 to 3: 311.99% increase within same budget
• Conversion Rate: 10.40% Facebook ads
• Twitter Followers: 79% increase
• Share of total site traffic: 10% of all traffic from Facebook

Testimonial

“We we’re initially sceptical about how social media would work for our brand and were reluctant to just jump on the bandwagon, but we’re impressed by Digital Clarity’s pragmatic approach and focus on ROI so set up a 3 months pilot. The results have far exceeded our expectations allowing us to lower our cost per acquisition as well as gain much more insight into the demographics of our users base which has helped us in refining our offering. We’ll be increasing our social media spend significantly in the coming months and are confident that by continuing to partner with Digital Clarity we’ll continue to fine tune our social media marketing.”

Carlo Walther – Marketing Manager – Findsyou