When a local family-owned boat dealership struggled to acquire new customers, they hired an agency to run Google Ads for them. As those campaigns failed to generate new leads, they began to look for a new partner. That’s when they found SEOM.

Strategy

We started with an audit of their existing account. The settings allowed Google to automatically apply changes to the account. But Google doesn’t understand your business – the recommendations suggested by machine learning primarily benefit Google. 

We’ve seen these automations add broad (often irrelevant) keywords, increase budgets, and generate new ad copy that doesn’t align with the brand. That’s why at SEOM, we don’t allow Google to automatically make changes to our campaigns. 

The approach to the campaigns themselves also didn’t align with the client’s goals. We learned from the client that the service department is the priority. But the existing campaign included a mix of keywords related to both sales and service. What’s more, the keywords were all broad match type, with no negative keywords refining the quality of the traffic.

It didn’t take us long to understand why the client wasn’t seeing results. SEOM paused the campaigns to conserve the client’s ad spend while we overhauled the account. 

We structured our campaigns to allow for the largest portion of the client’s budget to support service, with a smaller percentage going toward boat sales. We analyzed keyword research and identified high intent keywords for targeting. More importantly, the search term report from the previous campaigns was a gold mine for keywords to exclude — irrelevant searches that had previously wasted budget. 

With our keyword strategy at the ready and ad copy approved, the last component was the website. Unfortunately, the existing pages of the site left much to be desired. Since SEOM was also starting SEO for this client, we collaborated across departments to build better landing pages on the client’s website. 

We focused on better content, stronger calls to action, and clickable phone numbers to ensure users would have no trouble converting. Once the landing pages were updated, it was time to put everything to work!

Results 

The impact of the new campaigns was immediate, with the client noticing the uptick in new customers. And we had the numbers to back it up. With the old agency, the cost per lead (CPL) was $198 for 2023. In 2024, our PPC campaigns averaged $66 CPL.

With proper tracking in place to demonstrate ROI, the client increased their ad spend to scale the success and bring even more leads to their business. 

Overview

Results

$0

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

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