Case Study on Freight Transport - Freightplus

Intro

The Auckland-based company Freightplus works on shipping around New Zealand 🚚. The company has its own fleet of vehicles, storage facilities and professional management. All of this allows them to provide a wide range of services from day-to-day delivery to the transportation of oversized cargo. The company has something to bring customers, and to increase that number, PPC advertising was chosen. After setting up Google Ads, the number of orders increased slightly. However, realizing the potential of PPC advertising and wanting to increase its effectiveness, Freightplus turned to us.

Initial Data

• Client’s website – freightplus.nz
• Advertising system – Google Ads

In July 2020 we started communication with Freightplus. It turned out that the client was running ads from November 2019 to the end of June 2020. During this time, $15432 NZD was spent and 133 conversions occurred with an average cost of $116 NZD. We had to completely reconfigure the advertising campaigns. And in order to understand the specifics of the business and the client’s expectations from advertising, we started things by sending out a brief. After getting the necessary information, we worked out the campaigns’ structure and launched advertising on August 1. 📍 The cities and regions in New Zealand where the client has a license and between which Freightplus carries out cargo transportation, were indicated as GEOs.

Objectives

We needed to set up PPC advertising that would be more beneficial for the client than the one they already had. Accordingly, this had to get more conversions at a lower cost. To do this, we established the following objectives:

• Setting up search advertising in Google Ads with an updated structure.
• Set up search and banner remarketing for bringing back potential customers who’d been to the site but hadn’t taken targeted action.

The starting advertising budget was $2000 NZD per month.

Course of Action

One of the indicators that affect the cost of advertising is CTR, which was 7.48% when we started our cooperation. In order to increase it, we made the following decisions:

• To use dynamic search ads with all available extensions. We enhanced the snippet, increasing the percentage of transitions to the site, and also increased the ads’ informational content.
• To use a smart Target CPA strategy in order to customize Google Ads and serve ads to users more interested in ordering services from our client via machine learning.

Implementation

Advertising Structure

To launch search advertising we added 1101 keywords which match Freighplus services and made 5 campaigns in the search network:

🟢 Freight

• Bulk Transport
• Courier
• Freight Companies
• Generics
• Transport Company
• Trucking Companies (

🟢 Large Items

• Auction
• Auction – Competitors
• Large Items
• Large Packages
• Large Parcel
• Oversize Freight

🟢 Branded inquiries campaign with the name Freightplus.

🟢 Competitors. Campaign with queries on competitors. Here we don’t use keyword substitution in titles, in order to not overstep legally.

🟢 Search remarketing. Adjusted to more general queries, and divided into appropriate ad groups:

• Auction
• Brand
• Bulk Transport
• Companies
• Competitors
• Generics
• Large
• Location (Geo-queries for transportation from one city to another. The same keywords, but in more precise match types were used for other search campaigns and groups)
• Transport Company

We also set up banner remarketing to bring visitors back to the site

Search Ads

Each group used dynamic search advertising with keyword substitution (except for competitor groups), 15 titles/headings and 4 descriptions.

To make the ads even more relevant and increase the search snippet, we used the following extensions:

• Quick links: to pricing, same-day delivery, free quotes, and contact support.
• Phone number.
• Clarifications: ‘own warehouse’, ‘Simple pricing’, ‘Same day delivery’, ‘Professional team’, ‘Online ordering’, ‘Shipping all over New Zealand’, ‘staff support’, ‘High Quality.’
• Promotions for 100% free consultation.
• A structured snippet.

Advertising Strategy

For this job we applied our corporate strategy:

• We manually set bids to give Google Ads time to calculate the cost of the top search results.
• We set rates for the number 2 position.
• Within 3 weeks, we received enough stats on conversions and switched over to the smart Target CPA strategy.

We present the following target actions as conversions:

• Clicking on the e-mail or copying it
• Filling out a form on the site
• Calls via call tracking (substitute number on the site)
• Calls from a search ad without going to the site

Results

Work on the project continues today. CTR has risen from 7,48% to 14,81%. Total expenses for 3 months were $15724 NZD, bringing in 1061 conversions at an average cost of $14,81 NZD. By doing this, we managed to lower the cost for conversion by a factor of 8 🏆.

Campaign Data

• Competitors: 468 conversions at $15,19 NZD
• Freight: 449 conversions at $15,88 NZD
• Large Items: 48 conversions at $13,78 NZD
• Brand: 58 conversions at $2,63 NZD
• Search remarketing: 38 conversions at $17,21 NZD

The client was satisfied with the initial results, and the advertising budget was increased from 2000 NZD to 5000 NZD per month. And then up to 12,000 NZD per month after that.

The plans include configuring GDN campaigns and smart GDN campaigns that can be launched after enough conversion and audience data have been collected.

Seeing the advertising’s effectiveness, the client is ready to increase the budget and expand the campaign. But before moving on to the next stage, we’re considering different options for development such as expanding search queries, expanding GEO, increasing the cost of conversion for a significant jump in the number of conversions, or gradually growing them without increasing the cost.

Conclusion

Working on the Freightplus project proves once again that it is more profitable to trust professionals when it comes to PPC advertising. Since we work in the customer’s advertising account, they see the real data about the campaigns, and can evaluate their benefits and their savings in comparison with the previous situation. ☝ However even with positive dynamics, it’s especially important to make the right decisions in order not to drain the advertising budget. As such, we’re not in any hurry to make decisions regarding ad expansion. Instead, we’re closely monitoring the effectiveness of the current settings.