For part 3 of our "Coffee break" series, we caught up with Ryan Van Horn, Account Coordinator at the digital agency Razorfish, who shared with us how his team used Ad Sitelinks to improve the user experience on branded search queries for the travel services and insurance company AAA. Here's what Ryan had to say:
What was the primary campaign/product you were marketing for the client?
AAA’s main focus is to drive consumers to sign up for AAA Membership service. In addition, AAA has several other metrics that are considered when determining the success of the program, such as travel bookings and user interaction with their maps services.
What was the client's goal?
Essentially, AAA wanted to improve the user experience on branded search terms. Consumers identify with the AAA brand in different ways. For some consumers, AAA is synonymous with roadside assistance, while others may associate AAA with insurance or discounts when traveling. The client wanted to find a solution that allowed the messaging on branded terms to convey the different services offered and to understand which message converted better, ultimately informing future testing opportunities.
What Google solutions did you use to meet the goals?
Ad Sitelinks have allowed the team to tailor ad copy that encompassed the various AAA services by leveraging four additional links below the main ad copy. The links allow us to send consumers deeper into the AAA website and direct them to the most relevant landing page.
Can you describe the implementation process?
We chose the four services deemed most valuable by the client - Membership (join), Travel (bookings), Discounts, and AAA Map Services (Triptik Travel Planner) - and created a link for each service. We then selected the most relevant landing page for each link and created tracking that allowed us to monitor the performance of each individual link.
How did the Google solution perform?
The implementation of the Ad Sitelinks helped to improve both clickthrough rates (CTR) and conversion rates, as consumers were able to click on the link that was most relevant to the service they were interested in and sent them to the most relevant landing page.
What improvements did the client see as a result of this campaign?
The program saw significant improvements in performance across the board.
- CTR increased by 40%.
- The average CPC decreased by 11%.
- Overall conversion rate increased by 11%.
- The cost-per-conversion was 14% more efficient after implementation.
Did any results surprise you?
While we were not surprised that overall performance improved, we were surprised by how much the performance improved. Initially, the Ad Sitelinks were launched within a campaign that only included the core branded AAA keywords. This particular campaign is a key membership volume driver and already had extremely high CTRs and conversion rates. To see CTRs increase by 6% and conversion rates increase by 11% was a much higher increase than we anticipated.
If you did not use this Google solution, how would things have been different?
Had Ad Sitelinks not been made available, we wouldn’t have had the ability to improve the overall user experience. Ad Sitelinks have allowed us to give the users options of other services offered by AAA. The program would have likely remained steady and would have not seen the improvements in performance. Overall, we feel that this ad placement enhanced searchers' interaction with the AAA brand while simultaneously improving performance of the core metrics.
For more information on Ad Sitelinks, please visit the AdWords Help Center.
