UCtel PPC Promotion

PPC promotion for UCtel — the UK mobile signal enhancement company

Main advantages of the project advertising promotion 

• It pays off fully and supports the sales of other channels.
• Ads make up only 8% of the total traffic but represent 25% of all macro conversions.
• We reached full payback from the second month.
• After 3 months, the conversions increased by 1.5 times, and their cost was reduced by more than 3 times.

Introduction

A client approached us to increase the number of submissions for their business in the UK, which developed a promising product — indoor signal and coverage enhancement equipment.

The main target audience of the client is the B2B segment. Still, the experience has proven that completely ignoring the private segment is unnecessary (there have been submissions from ‘private individuals’ during our cooperation, and such deals showed a high profitability rate). It is crucial to allocate small budgets for testing the market, including an audience that is not your primary one.

The main peculiarity of the project is a narrow audience segment that may find the company’s services interesting and valuable. The company hasn’t previously launched paid advertising, and there was no statistical information on the effectiveness of contextual advertising tools, which means that advertising campaigns were launched ‘from scratch.’

Work stage

General information

Before our team started working, we conducted a competitor analysis to understand the promotion strategy and evaluate the promotion channels, analyze keywords that competitors used in ads, access the content of key pages to identify competitive advantages, etc. This is one of the key elements of developing a promotion strategy.

Next, we moved to the media planning stage, which focused on choosing advertising channels we could use to interact with our target audience. Also, we calculated their potential effectiveness.

We decided on Google Ads as our main channel and complemented it with Facebook Ads. At first, we wanted to test a larger number of hypotheses (regarding advertising channels, audiences, and campaign/ad formats), as the statistics collected for a specific project allow us to find growth points most effectively.

Also, one of the preparatory works involved creating a customer journey map — a visualization of the customer’s journey, which begins from the moment they search for a product and ends with completing a submission and signing a contract.

Below is an example of the Google Ads channel.

Google Ads 

During the first month, while providing PPC management services, we prepared the audiences, set up conversion tracking, and started creating search campaigns. We gradually removed inefficient variants of keywords, geotargeting, and ads.

Our team prioritized search campaigns because it is the easiest way to cover the target audience within the framework of the business specifics: when entering a request in the search bar, a user already has a basic idea about the product or is actively searching for a solution to a problem. 

The primary task for search campaigns was to identify as many untargeted requests as possible and create an extensive list of negative keywords even before the start of the campaign. To achieve this, we removed requests about enhancing the signal with the help of software or DIY technologies, and popular solutions that do not involve the use of special equipment.

We should also mention the ‘image’ use, which makes ads more visible and, consequently, it increases clickability — a CTR indicator increases, even when using simple images (a vector image of an antenna icon, etc.). 

In GDN (Google Display Network — a system for placing contextual advertising on sites, thematic, and search platforms via the Google Ads affiliate system), we focus on remarketing, which ensures repeated interaction with those who have already viewed the site without applying.

In addition to remarketing, we used GDN to test campaigns to attract new users. We prepared various options of creatives and several targeting choices (portraits of potential customers): from the broadest ones (common interests and themes) to narrower options (combinations of interests and particular audiences).

We used adaptive media ads to attract the target audience, which adjusted their size to the selected platforms. They are displayed both as images and in the form of text, which significantly increases the coverage.

Even though we didn’t expect significant growth in conversions from the media campaigns (the banner advertising format is mostly needed to increase brand awareness and attract more users to learn about the service), the results were unsatisfactory.

Based on the results we obtained in the first 14 days, we cleaned the platforms where we showed ads as much as possible and narrowed the targeting. This did not help either — the audience was uninterested (those who visited the site for the first time did not browse through it, did not pay attention to the content, and did not generate conversions).

We can conclude that it is better to use banner advertising to interact with those who have already visited the site, read the information, and have an idea about the provided signal enhancement solutions.

Facebook Ads 

We also allocated a small budget to the Facebook advertising channel, which we could use to determine the potential of this channel in terms of conversions (submissions).

Here, the situation is similar to campaigns in the Google Display Network — users interacted with the ad much more after their first visit to the site.

Additionally, not having enough narrow targeting options for the site’s theme complicated obtaining the results.

Using lookalike audiences based on converting users brought the best results, but the conversion cost was higher than using Google Ads. Also, the impact on associated conversions was minimal.

For this reason, we completely disabled the channel to save the budget after 30 days of testing different variations of targeting and ads.

As a PPC agency for Ecommerce, we also set up advertising for this type of business.

Conclusion

We concluded that current advertising brings a small but stable number of conversions at a fairly low price.

We should note that even a few conversions fully pay off the entire budget invested in advertising. In this case, advertising is profitable, even if the conversions ended in ordering a paid consultation that involved studying schemes of the premises (or on-site) and providing a client with recommendations to enhance the mobile signal.

Spending large budgets to get adequate results in paid traffic is not necessary. It is important to keep in mind that each project requires an individual approach.

It was possible to obtain such results thanks to the coordinated work of the project team. Regular and detailed feedback provided by the client helps to quickly optimize advertising campaigns, improve outcomes, and achieve set goals.

Further actions

Now, to further develop this project in terms of advertising, we plan the following: 

• Gradually scale effective search campaigns. Though the campaigns already bring results, some growth points are still available. In addition to the simple budget increase, there is another example, such as a ‘private 5G network’ service, which can be tested, etc.
• Test video advertising to boost the company’s visibility and increase the user’s understanding of the product. Video advertising on YouTube is much cheaper than search or even banner advertising. Additionally, it is possible to use short videos to explain why the solutions provided by the client’s company are necessary. Such advertising also enables interaction with potential customers based on ready-made solutions for signal quality problems. Moreover, you can prepare an individual offer for everyone who watched the video through remarketing to the YouTube audience, increasing the chances of conversion.
• Test the LinkedIn channel. At the moment, it is already possible to allocate a separate budget to the channel and begin testing it by using broader settings:
  • small and medium-sized companies;
  • people with specific posts who are capable of making decisions about cooperation with UCtel;
  • to further narrow down the audiences by industries in which the signal quality affects the efficiency of work processes.

We also perform SEO for the UCtel client and reach the TOP of Google by priority pages. Read the case study on how we managed to increase organic traffic on the UCtel website by 3650%.