Case Study
Prior to working with Search Laboratory, Hootsuite’s PPC campaigns were managed by a global digital agency with offices spread across Europe, running campaigns in their domestic markets. Having numerous offices in many different locations meant that there was little communication between different country campaigns and successes could not be shared easily while working with the previous provider.
Search Laboratory’s offering was unique in that it offered Hootsuite the ability to combine all their European campaigns to be managed by a single agency from the same geographical location, while maintaining the cultural and linguistic faithfulness that native linguists can provide.
Search Laboratory took over the running of Hootsuite’s Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch PPC campaigns using in-house linguists who could work together to create a more robust campaign that had a centralized strategy.
The main brief Hootsuite gave to Search Laboratory was to streamline and centralize the client’s international campaigns, making it easier to manage and implement a consistent strategy.
Hootsuite wanted Search Laboratory to increase its conversions for its “Pro” accounts as these are paid monthly subscriptions which have additional features to the free edition. The key measure of success was to decrease the customer acquisition cost to an agreed average across the campaigns.
The first stage of optimizing Hootsuite’s campaigns was to ensure that the whole team, including numerous linguists, knew what Hootsuite were looking for when they amalgamated their country-specific campaigns.
The team set about creating extensive lists of all keywords from each language campaign.
The next step was to carry out a search term review which involved removing any keywords that were performing poorly to ensure that budget was not being spent inefficiently. Bids were also reduced for keywords with lower conversion rates and high resultant CPAs.
Keyword expansion was also part of this review with ad groups set up that contained both exact match and Broad Match Modifier (BMM) variants for each individual set of international keywords. English keywords that were redundant in the international campaigns were also segregated into separate groups to avoid mixed language ads displaying.
Once these low-volume keywords were optimized as effectively as possible, the structure of the current ad groups was re-evaluated to make sure that they were grouped effectively and the page that was being served to the user was the most relevant one possible.
When the campaigns were, up and running, split testing of the ad text commenced, ensuring that the most effective ad with the strongest message was continually being displayed.
Bid reviews are carried daily using our proprietary bid management software, BidLab. This ensures that bids are consistently reflecting the conversion rate of keywords and high spending keywords are monitored and bids altered accordingly.
Demographic bid adjustments were also a large part of making these campaigns targeted and ensuring that bid prices reflected the relevancy of the user searching for Hootsuite’s products.
Location-based bid adjustments were made as the campaigns found major discrepancies between conversion rates in major cities as compared to smaller towns. For example, users searching in Barcelona had a much higher conversion rate, therefore bids were inflated by 26% whereas users in the Murcia region weren’t converting as well, meaning their bids were reduced by 28% and the overall campaign budget was spent efficiently.
Results
“As Hootsuite continues to grow globally, and in this context in EMEA, we needed to partner with an agency who understood our product, who could work with the challenges and barriers we faced operating in several markets, and indeed across multiple different languages. We chose Search Laboratory to manage our PPC campaigns due to their expertise in handling such challenges and since we have started working with them we have some excellent growth in our core markets.
We attribute a lot of this growth to Search Laboratory and the great work they have done with our campaigns, helping us to optimize and localize our PPC efforts in EMEA. Meticulous analysis, research and implementation has really benefited our organization.
Their innovation and proactive approach to existing and new campaigns, has helped to increase conversion for us. Keeping our brand messaging and values across diverse and complex regions has been one of the areas where Search Laboratory has also assisted us greatly.
As we continue to work with Search Laboratory we are confident we will see further growth in current markets and indeed into new regions.”
Rossa Brown, Manager – Growth Marketing Channels EMEA
This blog is part of our wider B2B Playbook that is designed to help B2B businesses with all aspects of their digital marketing from leveraging data, acquiring more traffic, creating assets that resonate and succeeding internationally.
If you’re thinking of expanding into international markets, the international section is for you. Here we review everything you’ll need to take into consideration when going global.
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