Case Study: 258% Increase in Conversions

Hey everybody, Adam with ParaCore and today I’m going to talk to you about how we got a 260% increase in conversions and a 300% increase in conversion value, within just a couple weeks when we took over a new account.

So, this is a very short case study. I’m going to talk to you a little bit about the account and what we did, and how we increased the conversion rate by 260%, the conversion value by 300%, just in a matter of weeks. Now, what you’re looking at is a chart for about a month long period, July 17th to August 15th and what you see here in red is the conversion value and blue is clicks. So, as you can see, right around the time that we started, that we took over the account, there were not a lot of clicks.

We made some small incremental changes, which didn’t really move the needle very much, and then just around here, around, what date is that, August 1st, is where the clicks and the conversions really started to pick up. So when you trend the blue line, you can see that the clicks are dramatically increasing and they’re leveling out here because we’re about hitting budget, which is about $133 a day. This is an online retailer so this is a shopping campaign, and then you also see the conversions spike quite dramatically and then also bump around here at their peak. It is, wait for it, I’m waiting for it to pop up, $2,400 in the day and then it’s averaging kind of closer to maybe $1,300 after that.

So, you see this huge spike in clicks and conversions and it all happens right around here and that is just no coincidence whatsoever. On the bottom here, you can see that we’re running a target return ad, it’s about 900%. That’s a bit of a recent change, we didn’t do that before but that’s the current setting. We’re seeing 12,000 clicks, 31 cents per click, a cost of $3,800, 609 conversions with a conversion value of $27,000.

Okay, so that’s kind of to set the stage. There are a lot of products in this feed, it’s almost 20,000 products, and they’re all very unique products. So it’s a very high volume of products and activity and the average cost per click is around 31 cents. I will say that with some of our campaigns, we see average cost per clicks for shopping lower than that, but in this case it’s 31%, so that’s just where we’re at.

Alright, so on this other tab, I’m going to show you just a little bit different view. I actually find this view sometimes harder to read and reconcile but it does show the data in a comparison way better. Now, so we’re doing, like, a 15 day window, and we have August 1st through 15th and then we’re doing the 15 days prior, the period prior, so thats putting us at July 17th to the 31st. If we look at cost, the cost is about the same, there’s only $174 variance, so the cost did go up 10% from July to August, and then when I slide over here, this is what you see with the 260%, 258%, changing conversions, 133 to 476, and then the conversion value went from $5,500 to $22,000, which was a change in conversion value of 300% and that’s really massive.

So, you’re probably sitting there wondering how in God’s name we got an account to go from 5,000 in conversion value to 22,000 very quickly. I mean, we’re looking at two weeks of data, but if you remember on this chart, it happened pretty much within a week, it happened very fast. And the way that we did that was we took over the account and it had a lot of the settings manual, and we took the settings and instead of doing a manual bid in the shopping campaign we set it at maximize clicks. Then we also decreased the budget down right to their exact budget amount. Now, the budget decrease I don’t think had too much to do with it, because to be quite honest, their search impression share is fairly low, given the breadth of their products, but we did decrease the budget and, in some cases, if you decrease the budget it actually generates more clicks. Because when you’re in a maximized clicks environment, if you keep decreasing the budget, then it’ll just move you down the page rank and page position until you start falling off and getting in a very low position.

So, sometimes decreasing the budget in a maximized clicks setting for your campaign will actually generate more conversions without actually changing anything. That’s a little bit of a tangent, but in this instance, we just change it to maximize clicks right around this date, I think it was, it was actually a Sunday, I remember exactly, Sunday July 29th, because I was involved in that, and you can see immediately, at that time, it started optimizing the campaign. It had a lot of history to go on, this campaign’s been running a long time and it just started changing the bids automatically, it changes them very regularly, and starts saying, we want to get the most bids possible, the most clicks possible, for this bid amount, and just keep adjusting the bids and keep making modifications automatically. And what ended up happening is that the number of clicks, represented by the blue, just started increasing dramatically over the course of the week, and that increase in clicks naturally resulted in an increase in conversions.

So, sometimes case studies are really elaborate. This case study is not. This is a very basic, straightforward case study where we really just made a couple settings. Now, we have, since then, started breaking out product groups, so, we have started doing re-targeting some other things, but early on, this is a very easy, kind of, quick win to get your return on ads going up, get your conversion rates up and do that quickly and efficiently without too much work. And then you can start doing more of the heavy lifting of breaking out certain product groups, doing re-targeting on Facebook, which is one of our next steps in this campaign, but really if you’re running a shopping campaign, or you’re running any campaign where you’re hitting budget, so you have to be hitting budget, maximize clicks is an amazing way to increase the number of clicks, which, in turn, increases the number of conversions, because, theoretically, your conversion rate stays pretty much the same if you’re getting more traffic. So, if you’re getting 100 clicks before, and your conversion rate is 10%, you’re then getting 10 conversions and if you do maximize clicks and it doubles the number of clicks, and, in our case, it way more than doubled it, then now you’re getting 200 clicks and you’re getting 200 conversions for the exact same amount of, 200 clicks and 20 conversions for the exact same amount of money which is really amazing.

Alright, so this is an e-commerce client, it’s a short window of just 30 days, but as you can see we were able to increase the cost per conversion and increase the number of conversions and all conversion value very, very rapidly and it stayed and maintained for a long period of time after that. So, if you’re running out of hours to count, you’re hitting budget, you want to try and optimize it, you’re doing manual bidding, try to optimize clicks and it’ll hopefully work out for you like it did us.

So, thanks for watching. Again, my name’s Adam, I own ParaCore, we’re a pay per click, lead generation agency and if you enjoyed the video please like and subscribe. Comment below if you have any questions and I’ll see you in the next video. Thanks a lot.