How Trimble (MRM), a B2B company that sells fleet management solutions for large companies increased their conversion rates, lowered their average cost per click, and decreased unqualified consumer requests while maintaining the same monthly budget.
It’s the classic B2B problem with Pay Per Click campaigns. You pay for keywords that attract not only your target B2B audience, but also inquisitive consumers who eat up your budget.
Challenge
Trimble MRM, fleet management SaaS company located in Fremont, CA, realized they needed to attract customers through an aggressive PPC campaign. They faced a number of issues that hampered the ROI on their PPC: low conversion rates, poor tracking, and too many unqualified consumers filling out lead forms.
When Trimble MRM’s marketing team came to WebMarketing123, they outlined some of the key problems they needed to address: out of date landing pages, two different PPC accounts, keywords identification, insufficient ads for testing and poor tracking after prospects arrive on landing page.
All of these problems resulted in 1.2% conversion rates and a whopping $570 cost per acquisition (CPA).
Campaign
The goals were clear. Trimble MRM and WebMarketing123 set a 2.1% conversion rate and $345 CPA as benchmarks for success, with emphasis on reducing consumer inquiries and attracting bigger fleets.
Several strategies were set in place:
- Find the keywords that attract fleets, not consumers
- Create ads that appeal to larger fleets
- Optimize and test landing pages
“We identified negative as well as positive keywords,” says the PPC account manager, Nicole Gardner. “For example we added ‘car’ and ‘auto’ as negative keywords and bid only on ‘fleet,’ ‘van,’ ‘truck,’ and “vehicle” type words. To make sure our ads attracted the right customer we talked about ROI and efficiency or we specified fleet sizes of 100+ and 500+.”
To increase conversions, WebMarketing123 created a new landing page micro-site to appeal to different verticals. “The new landing pages offer a variety of case studies, a live demo, and whitepapers that are specific to each vertical,” Nicole continues. “We got rid of the captcha form [[that scrambled code of letters and numbers you have to type in to submit a form] and streamlined the web-to-form inquiry capture and tracking process.”
All of this took 60 days to set up: 30 days for the new keywords, structure, ad and content network, and 30 days for testing, gathering data and optimizing.
Results
After four months, Trimble MRM’s PPC campaign not only met the benchmarks, but actually exceeded them. Conversion rates were at 2.33% and the CPA was at $260, surpassing budget and performance goals.
Furthermore, the addition of new phone numbers and email addresses to the landing page allowed Trimble MRM to track the source of inbound phone and email leads and discover that a large number of those inquiries originate from their PPC campaign.
The sales team experienced more relevant leads from the new PPC campaign, and they reported more conversions from larger prospects. This was a direct result of a 50% reduction in click through rate, which not only increased relevant conversions, but reduced the rate that the daily budget was expended, allowing ads to show for twice as many impressions before they hit budget. The end result of the campaign was that Trimble MRM experienced a lower overall volume of unqualified leads, an increase in inquiries from targeted larger customers and a higher daily impression count.
WebMarketing123 continues to analyze the results and optimize all aspects of the campaign to make sure Trimble MRM reaches its sales goals and keeps on attracting larger and more profitable fleets.