Audiology Pay Per Click Campaign Experiment

Pay Per Click In Audiology Marketing, An Experiment

The Experiment

We decided to take a look at Google Adwords for an experiment in Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). We had heard from several people that PPC was costing and not necessarily delivering returns. So we decided to have a look at it and test a campaign in the short term to gauge ROI and costings. As per our last post we approached the experiment in a particular way, we decided to be very focused with keyword phrases and design a landing page that was focused on those phrases. The key takeaways from the experiment were:

Focused Keyword Phrases, no more than four that are directly associated
Focused geo-targeting for maximum impact
Good advert copy that focuses on the keywords
A targeted and well optimised landing page that focuses on the keywords
A strong call to action on the landing page
Good planning and good strategy leads to great advert quality
Great advert quality leads to real monetary savings in your campaign
Change up the advert copy at least once a week, but don’t stray away from the key concepts

Framing the Campaign

We set relatively strict parameters for this campaign because it was an experiment. We set only a few the search terms for the campaign and geo targeted them to the Dublin area only. We built a landing page on the site that was optimised based on the advert copy and the keyword phrases that we were targeting with a big call to action leading to a contact form. In this way the campaign was exceptionally focused. We think that if you are to organise your own campaign that this should be the way forward for you.

We set a daily limit of €5. A day, whilst most clicks for the terms we targeted were a maximum of €5, because we had high advert quality it didn’t cost us anywhere near that for a click.  The key to an affordable and successful campaign is advert quality, but more of that later. Below are the figures as they are today.

Keyword report (Nov 5, 2014-Dec 4, 2014)
Keyword state	Keyword	Max. CPC	Clicks	Imp	CTR	Avg. CPC	Cost	Avg. position
enabled	“invisible hearing aids”	auto: 5.00	3	17	17.65%	2.14	6.41	1.4
enabled	“lyric hearing aids”	auto: 5.00	2	16	12.50%	1.3	2.6	2.1
enabled	“lyric hearing aid”	auto: 5.00	2	12	16.67%	1.46	2.93	1.8
enabled	lyric hearing aids cost	auto: 5.00	4	190	2.11%	2.33	9.32	2.1
enabled	phonak lyric hearing aids	auto: 5.00	2	20	10.00%	1.1	2.2	1.8

 

As you can see, we went after quite targeted keyword phrases; the industry standard is a 1% click,  through rate, according to Google. We far exceeded that click through rate during the campaign. We have learnt many things from the campaign, not least the power of defined targeting. The best CTR was in fact on invisible hearing aids, the impressions were a little low but we only added that term and started to adapt the landing page to it late in the campaign.

The next best performing phrase was Lyric Hearing Aid, with a 16.67% CTR followed by Lyric Hearing Aids and Phonak Lyric Hearing Aids with 12.5 and 10% respectively. The CTR of the terms decreased over time as the impressions grew, we should expect that but it begs the question would we have increased click through by changing up the advert every few days? I have a feeling that we would have; I base that on my hunch that some of the impressions are return visits to the search phrase.

For instance, if you can imagine, on Monday someone inputs the search phrase, read through some links and then went away. On Wednesday, they thought of something or wanted an address and re-input the search phrase. Hence they are now two impressions recorded; Google doesn’t seem to record new impressions or individual impressions. Based on that supposition I do think that it would be worth varying the advert copy every week at the very least.

In order to achieve a good advert quality we made sure that the advert copy was spot on in relation to the search terms. We also designed the landing page with this in mind. We paid serious attention to the copy, the meta title and the meta description of the landing page. During the campaign we were lucky enough to get feedback from a real life prospect who landed on it, the feedback persuaded us to add some more copy and some images. The clear definition strategy allowed us in some cases to achieve an advert quality of 9 out of ten for some keyword phrases.

This allowed us to keep the CTR costs lower than expected, for thirteen clicks to the landing page, of which 6 converted to the contact page, call it 45%, we paid a little over €23, much better than the possible €65 we could have paid. Unfortunately after speaking to the Practices we undertook the test with, it appears that none of the clicks converted to immediate sales enquiries or sales. To be really honest we were hoping for maybe two enquiries for our twenty five euro, it still may happen though. The Practices will continue to focus on tracking their enquiries.

On a different note, we have been tracking the campaign pages on Google Analytics. The results there are interesting. We have had 34 visits to the landing page http://lyrichearing.ie/try-lyric-hearing-aid, of those visits six have gone onto the contact us page, call it 17% conversion rate. It was an exceptionally worthwhile exercise for us, it helped us to identify some keywords and opportunities for differing landing pages targeting those keywords that should drive some more traffic and engagement for our customer.

It is also a proof as such for the concept of narrow focused PPC campaigns for audiology marketing. As per our last post, we believe that they are the only way to go with adwords campaigns, you might be tempted to bundle a load of keywords together within a campaign, but we believe that not only will it not pay off, it will actually cost you because your advert quality will suffer.

A Quick Update

There was some time delay on reporting, it transpires that four of the clicks from the campaign could be accounted for, the most prospect clicks we achieved were nine. One of the Practices actually received a booking form submission and is setting up a consultation. So we acquired a strong lead for about €16, if you factor out the four clicks.