How we helped a national airport parking company reduce its cost per sale by 60%.
OneStopParking.com is essentially a marketplace - although the entire experience is branded under the One Stop Parking name -that allows users looking for discounted airport parking to park at nearby hotels that have excess space in their parking lots. This is typically much cheaper than parking at the airport or other privately-run airport parking lots near the airport. Customers take the normal hotel shuttle from the hotel to the airport.
OneStopParking.com was managing paid search in-house and approached us to manage the campaigns to improve cost and performance.
The paid search effort was taking time away from running the business. Additionally, they didn't have a PPC expert on staff and so thought they could benefit from bringing in an outside agency to help.
We met at their office in Northern Kentucky to discuss the current situation and campaign goals. After looking over the existing AdWords account, two things were clear:
The problems were common ones:
We also identified some on-site issues that were likely reducing conversion rates.
This was a direct response campaign to drive bookings. Because of that, and the fact that there was plenty of volume to consume the client's budget on the search network alone, we disabled the display network completely.
Next, we setup ad extensions to improve click-through rate and quality score.
We grouped keywords into more tightly targeted ad groups and wrote all new ads.
We reviewed the search query reports and Google's keyword tool to identify negative keywords at both the campaign and ad group level.
Over the course of the next several months we tested ad variations and ad position to further reduce the cost per sale.
The first month we took over costs actually increased about 15%. This is not uncommon and is primarily because we increased bids to target a higher ad position so we could establish a performance benchmark. It can be difficult to establish performance benchmarks at lower ad positions because click-through rates are always lower than normal at lower ad positions. Bidding for a higher ad position allowed us to get a picture of the best possible click-through rate.
Over the course of the next two months, costs dropped dramatically. By the third month, actual cost per sale was down 66% from baseline and continued a slow decline over the following months. The client opted to triple the budget and we were able to to scale those results to drive 3x as many bookings for the same ad spend as before they hired us.
Razorlight Media was amazing. In a very short period of time they were able to optimize our PPC campaigns and reduce our cost per sale to a third of what it was before.
Devesh Patel, Owner / President, OneStopParking