Standard Tools and Equipment Co. Case Study
Paint-Booths.com is operated by Standard Tools and Equipment Co. Established in 1979 to service the auto body and collision repair industry. Standard Tools and Equipment is the leading U.S. manufacturer of 18 gauge galvanized steel paint booths sold direct to automotive body shops, automobile repair and restoration shops, institutional (government, education) and industrial markets.
E-commerce transactions are an important source of revenue for Standard Tools. However, phone calls leads are vital to as well since most customers still prefer to have a conversation with their experts before making a complex (often customized), large ticket item purchase.
The Challenge
In August 2019, we were making plans for the final quarter of 2019 for Paint-Booths.com’s PPC campaign. There had been a concerning trend in June and July 2019 where their average CPC had started trending steadily higher. While this trend was also directly corresponding to more phone call leads for their business, it was also jeopardizing their monthly ad budget and overall ROI since the number of ad clicks and conversions were both trending steadily lower.
With planned monthly ad spend increases in the months ahead, what would be the best use for these budget increases to improve their ROI? Some of the funds would be applied to the extra PPC demands that we have come to expect with their legacy PPC campaigns at the end of each year. However, we planned to use some of this extra PPC budget to expand into new campaigns that we believed would lead us to new opportunities for maximizing their ROI that will carry forward into 2020.
Objectives
From September through December 2019 use Paint-Booths.com’s Google Ads’ budget increases to find ways to drive more traffic, get more phone calls, and increase e-commerce revenues while reducing average CPC.
Strategy Initiated
We made 1.15K Google Ads changes from September through December 2019. The majority of those changes were part of our routine PPC account management tasks which are based on PPC performance data as it relates to testing new ad creatives and adjusting keyword targeting. Other significant data driven actions during this time included:
- Planned ad spend budget increases were applied
- Adjusted device bidding modification settings for search ads campaigns
- Paused underperforming search ad group that was costly and demonstrated little potential for improvement
- Added new expanded search ads for ad performance testing
- Having collected enough performance data, we changed the Call Only campaign bid strategy to “maximize conversions”
- Smart Shopping campaign launched with location targeting and brand new target location exclusion feature
- Changed the bidding strategy on all search campaigns to Target CPA according to historical performance data
- Planned ad spend budget increases were applied
- Search ads’ target Audience bid adjustments were increased
- Display Ads campaign implemented using Responsive Display Ads and target Audiences
- Planned as spend budget increases were applied
- Paused underperforming search ad group that was costly and demonstrated little potential for improvement
- Having collected enough performance data, we changed the Display Ads campaign bid strategy to “maximize conversions”
From September-December 2019 two important KPIs for our objectives to monitor during this time were our Avg. CPC and Phone Calls trends. We succeeded in decreasing our Avg. CPC costs while also increasing the number of Phone Call leads… and we accomplished a lot more!
Success! (Our Results)
- Monthly total ad cost increased 21%*
- Clicks steadily increased 185%
- Average cost per click decreased 57%
- Conversions increased 36%
- Cost per conversion decreased 11%
- Phone call leads increased %56
149.88%
149.88% increase in Users (users who have initiated at least one visitor session)
142.48%
142.48% increase in Sessions (users’ active engagements with the website)
191.79%
191.79% increase in Revenue (e-commerce revenue)
507.69%
507.69% increase in Transactions (number of completed purchases)
150.62%
150.62% E-commerce Conversion Rate (percentage of sessions that resulted in an e-commerce transaction)
20.34%
20.34% increase in Per Session Value (average revenue per session)
