Situation
This company is one of the top mortgage lenders in the U.S. With roots that go back over two decades, the company helps families buy homes, lower payments on their current mortgages, and get cash for their home’s equity.
For their search engine marketing campaign, marketers for the corporate website were looking to attain as many leads through pay per click advertising (PPC) as possible, while spending less than their targeted CPL (cost per lead) of $85.
Challenges
When the client came to iProspect, they were managing their PPC campaign in-house, and the results they had achieved were less than they had hoped. Their CPL was too high, their target keyword list was small, and they only had enough bandwidth to target two engines: Google and Yahoo!. Furthermore, the online mortgage marketplace was quite competitive and the battle for top positions within the paid search results was growing more aggressive. As a result, they weren’t driving a substantial number of leads to their website.
Solutions
At the outset of the campaign, the iProspect team researched the mortgage industry and the behavior of the client’s target market—families and individuals looking to buy homes, refinance, get cash for their equity or find additional financial information. iProspect subsequently recommended the client expand their keyword list to include more relevant, non-branded phrases. The team was then able to more efficiently re-structure the campaign by amending ad creative, assisting the client in building landing pages to target specific pages/sections of the website, and improving the bidding strategy to be more aligned with the client’s CPL goal. iProspect utilized their automated bid management tool, iSEBA®
(iProspect Search Engine Bidding Agent), to optimize the company’s PPC campaign, and uncover the most productive combinations of keyword/position/price/time/day on which to bid. Additionally, the iProspect team expanded the client’s engine presence by adding MSN and Ask.com.
Results
The following results were achieved by the client after contracting with iProspect:
In six months, the number of monthly leads climbed from 367 to 2,292—a 525% increase.
In the same time frame, CPL decreased by 41%—from $114 to $67— exceeding the client’s $85 CPL goal by 21%.
del.icio.us
