To get started, we identified top growth opportunities with Facebook and YouTube marketing. This included:
- Setting up platforms for success using our best-in-class campaign structures.
- Testing lead ads to reduce UX friction.
- Capturing qualified users through prospecting strategies and bringing them into a series of retargeting steps to create a funnel sequence – without spending millions of dollars.
- Initial campaign learnings that fueled the creation of new documents and revenue sources for the business.
While this company had been the leader in the legal documents category, their branded search volume was not growing at the same rate as their competition. We also uncovered other ways we could grow the company’s footprint. Examples of these were:
- Expanding audience targets beyond SMB owners.
- Implementing iterative creative testing.
- Utilizing a broader awareness approach through retargeting to generate additional demand.
- Entering new marketing channels (LinkedIn, Google UAC, Apple Search Ads, etc.).
Challenging Historical Norms
Taking a comprehensive approach, we implemented two main strategies to drive growth: aligning the company’s account structure with industry and platform changes, while also going after more mobile users.
Embracing MKAGs, Automation, and Mobile
While the company was already heavily leveraging automated bidding, their campaigns were in Alpha/Beta single-keyword ad group (SKAG) structure, which had been a best practice of ours for many years. But based on the recent success of smart bidding, responsive search ads, and less control over keyword mapping due to the industry’s embrace of automation, our approach needed to evolve.
Our team restructured the campaigns into multi-keyword ad groups (MKAGs) to group similar keyword themes together and saw immediate improvements in the Google algorithm’s ability to optimize – thanks to greater data density – and uncovered more impression volume.
Additionally, we chose not to leverage an algorithmic bidding platform like SA360 and rely solely on individual engine bidding algorithms. This proved to be extremely valuable, especially in Microsoft, where the team chose to leverage their native target cost-per-acquisition (tCPA) strategies. When we found that Microsoft’s tCPA strategies outperformed Search Ads 360’s CPA bid strategies, we migrated the majority of the company’s campaigns over to Microsoft. Loosening up mobile modifiers and embracing automated bidding also helped the company tap into growing mobile searches.
