Case Study: Online Database of Businesses for Sale
“Coming from another PPC vendor whose campaign practices and results did not meet our expectations, we were discouraged. But, to our
surprise and delight, iProspect was able to turn the campaign around and accomplish more in the first two weeks than our previous vendor did throughout the entire campaign!”
- Marketing Director
Situation
This website, owned and operated by an online media company, provides its members access to the oldest online database of businesses that are being offered for sale. It is a resource for thousands of potential business buyers throughout the world, including: small and large companies, private equity groups, business brokers, investment bankers, and individual buyers. The site also has a “Business Wanted” section that enables buyers to post descriptions of businesses that they seek, and enables sellers to search a database of “Wanted” businesses by industry and location.
When the company approached iProspect, they sought to improve the pay per click (PPC) advertising campaign for the website by maximizing the number of new member sign-ups they were generating on a monthly basis, while decreasing their CPA (cost per acquisition) for a new member.
Challenges
Prior to coming to iProspect, the company’s PPC campaign had been managed by a vendor whose results did not meet the client’s expectations. The campaign’s CPA was too high and its conversion rate was too low. Additionally, their targeted keyword set was not representative of the client’s complete service offering. The company also felt their previous vendor did not effectively manage their bidding process or continuously optimize the campaign.
Solutions
At the outset of the campaign, the iProspect team researched the query behavior of the website’s target market—companies and individuals inquiring about purchasing or selling a business. iProspect subsequently recommended the company enhance their keyword list to include more relevant, non-branded phrases and segment those keywords into relevant ad groups. The team was then able to efficiently re-structure the campaign by categorizing the keywords to target specific audiences, craft audience-specific landing pages, amend ad creative, and improve the bidding strategy to be more aligned with the company’s CPA goal.
Additional efforts have included expanding the company’s search engine presence by bidding on MSN, testing of ad creative and segmentation of the campaign within the engines.
Results
Within 4 months, membership sign-ups increased by 111% per month.
More specifically:
Membership sign-ups in Google increased by 130%.
Membership sign-ups in Yahoo! increased by 147%.
Membership sign-ups in Business.com increased by 85%.
Within 4 months, the CPA dropped by 65% per month.
More specifically:
CPA in Google decreased by 56% per month.
CPA in Yahoo! decreased by 52% per month.
CPA in Business.com decreased by 50% per month.
Within 4 months, the campaign’s conversion rate in Google increased by 54% per month.
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