The same budget – significantly better results. Another one of our client stories

I will start by saying that, like any advertising agency, we conduct many audits. With our audits, we do not aim to paint a doomsday scenario and point fingers at how badly another advertising agency works. I always say that our audit should be viewed skeptically because we did not participate in the decision-making process, nor do we know the goals and all the intentions. Also, agencies have their own style and successful practices, and these may differ. It is important that the goals are achieved.

But there are mistakes that are critical. And today I will talk about such mistakes by unravelling the ads of another client of ours.

I cannot disclose who this client is or what field they work in, but because of this, I can show more data and comment on it.

‍

Meta Ads

I cannot say this is an exceptional story. When auditing, I often notice ads launched with Engagement, Traffic, or Reach objectives. This case is very similar – almost all ads were optimised for traffic. With such optimisation, we ask Meta to bring as much traffic as possible to the website for the lowest possible price. The result: lots of traffic and very, very few conversions. In our agency, traffic campaigns are almost never used – only in rare cases when we aim for specific goals.

Here you can see how expensive an enquiry with the Traffic objective cost this business: €150 per enquiry, €236 per enquiry. Expensive? It depends on how much you can pay for a client. But in this case, we knew that we could generate enquiries more cheaply in such a sector. Whenever I open an account and see Traffic, Reach, and Engagement ads, I can confidently say we can do better.

Of course, before we came in, conversions such as clicks on phone numbers, email addresses, or copying them had not been configured. And for this business, these are important conversions, as a considerable number of enquiries are received by phone or email. Therefore, we could not fully evaluate the effectiveness of the ads. Before launching, you always need to check whether all tracking is in place and working. In this case, it was not done.

As I already mentioned, with the wrong ad objectives comes the wrong audience. I took one campaign and broke it down by age. We can see that out of €647, €222 was spent on the 65+ audience, and €190 on the 55–64 age group. We caught the attention of seniors, but so what? This business’s target audience age is 25–55 years. This is what happens if we ask Meta for engagement. Simply put, the best ‘likers’ and commentators in the country are… seniors. You cannot compete with them.

So why wasn’t the audience age-capped, I hear you ask. Maybe it was. But Meta has become so cunning and tricky that it still allows itself to improvise with audiences and show ads to people outside your set limits. And only an experienced specialist knows where and how to tame Meta’s wilfulness.

So what did we do? We fixed the tracking – we started to see not only enquiries, but also clicks on phone numbers and email addresses, and when they were copied. Of course, we changed the ad campaign objectives and concentrated on enquiries. We started collecting enquiries within the Meta network. Enquiries received directly within the Meta network are usually less targeted, but additional questions for the potential client solve this problem well.

And the result is this:

Collecting enquiries within the Meta network yielded a very good result – just €9.22 per enquiry. We have been running this campaign from the very beginning until now. The client shares comments with us – regarding whether the enquiries coming in are targeted. And the majority of these enquiries are indeed targeted.

Enquiries from other campaigns are now collected on the website, and they are significantly more expensive. But this is still sometimes cheaper than it was before. The final enquiry price does not include conversions such as clicks on phone numbers, email addresses, or copying them. Adding these conversions, the result would be even better. Of course, the result was also influenced by newly created visuals, videos, and website corrections. However, I am not going into them here, as I simply cannot show or disclose them.

‍

Google Ads

When conducting a Google Ads audit, I was surprised by such a large and cheap volume of conversions. Hmm, 500 conversions, and the cost per conversion is €6.72. If this were true, why are budgets not being increased to collect more enquiries?

The point is that the specialists themselves define for Google what counts as a conversion. In this case you simply need to look at what these conversions are. Below you can see a breakdown of one of the campaigns by conversion. It shows that the main conversions are visits to the contact subpage. When setting up tracking, we also create such an event, as it can show whether the target audience is really coming to the website. If the share of visitors to the contact subpage relative to all visitors is high, it means the incoming traffic is relevant. After all, people do not go to the contact subpage if the product is completely irrelevant to them.

But this is certainly not an event that should be treated as a primary conversion. In this case, it should be the filling out of an enquiry form, clicks on a phone number and email addresses, and the copying of them. Everything else should be left as secondary events. In this case, we cannot say what result the advertising generated – it is simply not tracked.

It is worth mentioning that the branded keyword was not excluded from the campaigns. This is a frequently encountered mistake. We often see good campaign results, but upon entering the campaign, we see that the branded keyword generated the majority of conversions. We are not against running a branded keyword as an advertisement, but such a campaign must run separately from the rest. Otherwise, the result is simply embellished.

We did not perform any miracles. We simply did a thorough job following our procedures and managed to improve the result immediately.

Here you can see that with the main campaign we generated almost 360 conversions, and the cost per conversion was €14. Yes, there is a campaign where the conversion cost reached as high as €116. But at the moment the budget for this campaign is very small. Due to high competition in this product category, clicks are expensive, so the final conversion cost is high. Therefore, we are still looking for ways to reduce the cost and get more enquiries for this category. With this campaign, I want to show you the truth – it is not always possible to find answers quickly. After all, I could have chosen only the campaigns generating a good result and shown them, but then I would create a huge expectation for potential clients of our agency. And that is not something I want to do. I want to stress that we are not magicians; what we do is work in a structured, honest way, and we do not ignore problems – we solve them.

Since I have spoken a lot about conversions, it would be unfair not to show what hides behind the word ‘Conversions’. Here it is:

You can see that people who “google” things like to call or write an email immediately, and fill out enquiry forms less frequently.

So what did we do? We fixed the tracking – we started to see not only enquiries, but also clicks on phone numbers and email addresses, and when they were copied. Of course, we changed the ad campaign objectives and concentrated on enquiries. We started collecting enquiries within the Meta network. Enquiries received directly within the Meta network are usually less targeted, but additional questions for the potential client solve this problem well.

‍

And the result is this:

Well, then. A simple change, revenue is growing – what next? If ads are bringing profit to the company, it is a sin not to increase the advertising budget. And in our company, this is viewed seriously – if ads are profitable, but the budget is not increased, it is a gross error by the agency. After all, this way the client loses additional revenue. Yes, I have heard that clients sometimes refuse to increase the budget. But perhaps the real problem is that the client does not actually feel the result that the marketing reports are “painting”?

‍

Conclusion

I want to emphasise that good advertising results were primarily determined by active communication with the client. Regarding advertising, we communicate almost every day. Sometimes we even forget to say hello and get straight to the point. That is how it is with online advertising – one must react quickly.

Here you can see how expensive an enquiry with the Traffic objective cost this business: €150 per enquiry, €236 per enquiry. Expensive? It depends on how much you can pay for a client. But in this case, we knew that we could generate enquiries more cheaply in such a sector. Whenever I open an account and see Traffic, Reach, and Engagement ads, I can confidently say we can do better.

Dear reader, we need to talk if you can attribute the following statements to your advertising setup:

In Meta advertising, you run campaigns with Reach, Engagement, or Traffic objectives.
You have no clear view of what results your digital advertising is generating.
You receive only a monthly report from the agency, and the last time you communicated with a specialist was so long ago you can hardly remember.
Your advertising accounts were last accessed a month ago or, God forbid, even later.
You have to wait a week for answers from the advertising specialist. Or they simply disappear. It happens.

‍

This is not a game of ‘Bingo’ – it is enough to recognise yourself in just one statement. And if all statements fit your advertising setup, you have huge potential. Write to us.