ClickTracks Helps AIMS Slash Client's PPC Ad Spend by 40% Without Trashing Lead Count

AIMS is an Internet Marketing Company that specializes in designing and implementing Internet Marketing Strategies for high-tech, medical device and exporting companies. The company offers a variety of online marketing services, including search engine optimization, PPC advertising management, and conversion rate optimization.

"One of the first things we'd done when we started our work for Algorithmic Research (ARX) was to optimize their existing PPC campaigns," noted Ron Spinner, General Manager of AIMS. "As a result of our initial success, ARX needed some time to ramp up to handle all of the additional leads." ARX requested an immediate 40% reduction in their Google Adwords monthly spend while minimizing any reduction in leads—a very difficult task.

ClickTracks Shows Which Ads Can Be Eliminated, Which Ones Must Stay
Using ClickTracks, Ron's team was able to determine which campaigns had the highest ROI and which ones appeared to have the least impact on the lead count. "We exported the ClickTracks Campaign report to Excel and took a look at the data. We had 16 campaigns running. Since time was of the essence, the first thing we did was to eliminate the ad groups where spending was extremely low--we didn't want to waste time getting caught up on them," said Ron. "With that step, we eliminated 8 ad groups. Then, we sorted the remaining ad groups based on the average amount of time on site."

Once the groups were sorted and ready to go, Ron and his team got to work at determining where they could trim the remaining ad groups:

• Ad groups that had a low time on site and a very high number of people who left the site within 5 seconds were eliminated.
• Ad groups that had a low time on site but a significant number of people who stayed on the site for more than 5 seconds had their bids lowered and ads adjusted to filter out unwanted traffic.

A 40% Budget Reduction With Only a 17% Decrease in Leads
Within weeks of the client's request, AIMS had effectively reduced the PPC advertising budget by the required 40%. "We were able to significantly reduce the pay per click spend on 18 of the ad groups," Ron said. "And by using ClickTracks to help identify campaigns that didn't convert as well, ARX's web site lead count decreased by only 17%. I can't imagine how we would have tackled the problem without ClickTracks. We didn't have enough conversions on this B2B site to make a decision as to which part of the campaigns to adjust. ClickTracks came to the rescue."

ClickTracks Gives Flexibility in Analysis
"We like ClickTracks because it gives us a lot of flexibility. It wasn't like we were just deleting campaigns based on numbers alone--more important markets deserved more leeway, as did lower cost-per-clicks. Because ClickTracks shows cost-per-click, time on site and % of short visits in one report, we can see how a particular campaign stacks up on a number of different fronts," Ron noted. "We also like the fact that ClickTracks' reports are so client-friendly that it's easy to create a quick report and help our clients better understand our recommendations."

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