Initially, this material was thought a little different: we planned to simply talk about how at the end of last year we set up an advertisement for a company that offers plumbing services to the market. But then we realized that without retelling our daily dialogues with the client, the story is pretty bland.
Therefore, it turned out two in one: on the one hand, a case of how we set up advertising in limited combat conditions, on the other hand, behind the scenes of work. Yes, and one more thing: if you notice a note of irony in the text, keep in mind that we are kind.
Leader and 12 plumbers
The client – a company that includes the owner and 12 plumber specialists – came to the eLama agency in October 2020. The team offers the market standard services with a plumber’s house call: elimination of blockages, leaks, installation and repair of equipment.
The main goal set for us by the head was to increase the number of applications and reduce their cost. Understood, accepted.
At the start, the client already had working campaigns in Yandex.Direct and Google Ads with settings from the previous contractor. Targeting region – St. Petersburg.
Let us note two points that were important to take into account in our work:
- Plumbing call home services are a very competitive niche. Hence – a heated auction and always high bids.
- The client received applications exclusively from contextual advertising, the company did not have any other channel for attracting clients. For this reason, it was almost impossible to test any tools or strategies. It takes from a couple of days to two weeks to connect auto strategies or create new ads, and losing traffic even for a couple of hours – as we will see later – is unacceptable for a client. Therefore, all that was left for us was to adjust the rates pointwise, by separate keys, daily, and sometimes hourly. And also to have interesting dialogues about whether advertising settings are accurately applied to plumbing services.
My phone rang
Conversations with the leader are an important separate part of this story. In our opinion, indicative – about what it really feels like to work with a client directly.
At eLama, we deliberately excluded the link in the form of an account manager from communication in order to better understand the needs of the customer and quickly coordinate project solutions.
– Hello. 10:30 am, we have no applications! People without work are sitting! What’s happening?
– Good morning. This is possible: not every morning the demand for plumbing services can be high. Plus our ads run at 09:00. Let’s wait an hour and a half. We are sure that applications will be sent soon.
At 11, the situation gets better. Exhale.
Let’s tell you a secret: this is one of those clients for which Calltouch (a web analytics service based on call tracking – editor’s note) does not close in the browser of our team. Since in this story we have only one traffic channel, the situation has to be monitored constantly.
12:30. Again, a letter from the head.
– So, three hours have passed – we have five applications less than yesterday at the same time. Why so, what are you doing there?
– We are sorry that there are fewer applications at the moment, but it is wrong to draw a conclusion about the effectiveness of an advertising campaign in the middle of the day. Every day, in the evening, we monitor the number of applications – there has been no drop in traffic in the last days. If this happens, we will take action.
The customer hangs up angrily. We check the settings: there is indeed a recession, but insignificant. We analyze the rates, make a report on the keys from both systems, make adjustments, send a report to the client. We are sure that by the end of the day there will be as many applications as yesterday, or even more.
This kind of dialogue is a constant practice. It does not change depending on weather conditions or work results. For example, here is a list of what we did in the first two months of work, October and November:
- We expanded the semantic core for all advertising campaigns in both systems.
- Adjusted the settings for advertising campaigns.
- We reworked the texts and conducted A / B testing in order to select the most effective additional ads (in particular, we removed the prices from the ad texts, adjusted the promotions).
- We set up a bidder and made adjustments to its strategy.
- Disabled ineffective queries after statistics accumulation.
- Adjusted the rates for social demo and devices.
- We cleaned up the traffic.
In addition, we launched additional types of advertising campaigns: a banner on search and YAN and CCM for services.
They did not launch retargeting and remarketing – the reports showed that the average time for a user to make a decision was only one day.
End of the working day, 18:15. There are indeed more applications by this time than yesterday. Another letter.
– Applications are applications, but in sales we are sagging: this month they handle some trifles and the call does not always end with a call from a specialist.
“We understand your concerns, but we would like to explain that what we do is generate traffic, not sales. Traffic is not less or more, we have fluctuations from day to day – no more than 10%.
– I will ask you to change the manager tomorrow.
– Okay, the manager will contact you in the morning…
By the way, about the quality of applications. Turbo pages have been added to almost all of the client’s advertisements by someone before us. From there, judging by the call tracking data, a significant part of the leads came.
In the process, we found out that the target type on the Turbo pages was chosen incorrectly – “Click on the phone number”. This means that among the large number of leads, there were quite a few low-quality ones, because the user can click, but in the end not call. Therefore, we made the decision to turn off Turbo pages and make separate landing pages for each region on the main site.
After the changes were made, the number of calls increased, but their cost increased to ~ 1800 rubles. To reduce the cost of bids in an overheated auction, we decided to segment effective and ineffective queries into different campaigns and adjust bids on a weekly basis at the campaign and individual keyword level.
So for the period from October to December 2020, we achieved the following indicators:
|
Month |
Leads |
Lead price |
|
September |
642 |
1 445 ₽ |
|
October |
749 |
1 778 ₽ |
|
November |
792 |
1 725 ₽ |
|
December |
866 |
1 365 ₽ |
We work further
As you can see from the table and charts below, the number of leads in December increased by 34% compared to September, the price of a lead decreased by 5%.
The price of a lead in January is 16% lower than in September and 12% lower than in December.
The next morning, 9:30 am again. In dialogue with the client: team lead, project manager, our leader. The latter is interested in:
– I was informed that you wanted to change the manager. I propose to discuss this issue – we are always ready to meet halfway, but first it is important to understand what is wrong.
– You know, in general, everything is in order. We will not change anyone. We work further. What’s with the applications today?
Spoiler: In January-February, this client will leave us for another contractor, and in March he will return again – dissatisfied with the results of the new business relationship.
What can I say? We work further.
The ad was set up by Anna Osadchy’s group. Project manager – Alexander Vankin.