Pulling Levers Blog

An Online Marketing Case Study

Client:

A large, private university with multiple campuses across the United States.

Challenge:

Lever Interactive was hired to manage a university’s existing online advertising pay-per-click (PPC) program to generate prospective student leads. The main goal of the program was to increase the overall number of leads, with a concentration on growing lead counts and efficiency from non-branded keywords.
Often organizations rely on the efficiency and ease of brand keywords in PPC campaigns to off-set under-performing non-branded campaigns. However, it is vital for any successful PPC campaign to maintain and grow efficient non-branded campaigns because this is where more volume and untapped audiences exist.

Approach:

Lever Interactive took over the existing campaigns and performed an audit of the account’s keywords, ads, landing pages, bids and budgets. Using custom reports that provided keyword level trending data, Lever quickly identified over- and under-performing areas of the account. After a full analysis, Lever began testing new bidding strategies, landing page designs and ad extensions.

Tactics:

• Optimization of existing Google search and display network advertising and Bing/Yahoo search advertising, including but not limited to:
• Paused inefficient non-brand keywords
• Increased bidding to better compete with the industry and run ads in higher positions. Higher bids were facilitated with increased budgets following tests that proved the effectiveness of this approach
• Increased use of ad extensions, including sitelinks and call extensions
• Tested landing pages to improve conversion rates
• Launched Facebook and LinkedIn PPC advertising
• Launched direct display buys from reputable websites in the campus’ markets

Results:

Two months after taking over management of the PPC program, Lever Interactive was able to generate significant lead growth in non-brand campaigns, as well as incremental growth in brand leads. Overall efficiency of the campaigns also improved simultaneous with the lead growth.
In the first 5 months of Lever’s management:

• Overall number of leads increased 222%
• Non-brand leads increased 512%
• Brand leads increased 133%
• Cost-per-lead (brand and non-brand) decreased 44%

We develop close relationships with our clients so that we can understand their entire business and help where we can succeed even further. We don’t just look at keywords and ads within a paid search campaign, we take into consideration everything, including landing pages, shopping experience on the website, offline marketing, anything we can get our hands on to see what impact those components have on paid search and vice versa. Part of that includes the ecommerce platform the site is utilizing. Understanding the platform’s strengths and weaknesses helps us and the client know what we can highlight as well as limitations the store may have.

In our long-standing relationship with ThePetStoreOnline.com, we had both come to an agreement that the Yahoo store platform the site was using was creating more limitations to the overall conversion rate of the site. With our many successes of using Miva Merchant as an ecommerce platform, we worked closely with ThePetStoreOnline.com to switch from a Yahoo store to Miva Merchant. I recently wrote a guest blog for Miva Merchant about this transition. While no transition is ever easy, one that we had confidence in resulting in even further success for our client was definitely fun and worth it.

Guest Blog: Case Study: The PetStoreOnline.com And Miva Merchant

I recently signed up for a website to interact with fellow bloggers.  Upon sign up I was confused as to what to do next, and gave up as I had more pressing tasks to deal with.   But no worries, I got an email from the company admitting they have usability problems:

Hey jendavislever,

One of the most frequent complaints I hear is that our site is hard to figure… which is partly true because we have too many quite unique features. Today’s step will help you make sense of the service.

Interesting approach to a usability problem, but obviously not one that helps me use the website.  Granted, admitting the problem is the first step, but they have justified it by indicating they have “too many quite unique features.”

The next part of the email introduced their remedy to fix the problem:

We are doing our best to create a clear, easy-to-understand structure, therefore we have introduced “Categories” to somehow categorize and organize new offers.

But I’m not convinced categories are the right answer, even without looking at the site again because their own wording does not convince me: “to somehow categorize…” The word somehow does not show confidence in this fix.

The email continues by telling me how to use the categories in the different areas of the site.  But it adds to more confusion as in one area I am supposed to “look for ‘Category’ drop down” but in another area I am supposed to browse by category using the “icon navigation on top of it.”  In looking at the website, and sure enough, one area it is drop down, the other it is a set of icons, but the categories are the same. There is no apparent reason for the difference.

Next, there are four different search options on the website.  In some ways this may be good if using advanced options but in this instance there are literally four separate search pages which is not good.  Give the user one search, and provide advanced options to search the site vs. user forums for instance.

And this point I have pretty much abandoned even attempting using the site, as it isn’t worth my time to try and navigate it.  And even it I was still considering it, the next paragraph of the email completely turns me off:

Reporting users and threadsWe are a friendly community and we are willing to welcome everyone. However some people want to abuse our tools and we can protect ourselves by reporting those users:

When do I report users and forum?

What follows is more text about reporting others, more text than was used to explain their usability problems. If bad user behavior is such a problem that it has to be address in an email, this is not a community I want to part of.

This email is listed as the second of a five-step course. I’m already turned off at step two and have completely given up on this service.

Making a great user experience should be the number concern of running any website.  Using email to apologize for user experience is not a way to overcome any usability issues.

If you have ever run a Google Website Optimizer test, you have probably heard a similar question at the end of the test, when a winner is declared:

“How do I know it was really the winner and not just chance that visitors converted from that page?”

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