The Strategy

The goal of this campaign was to generate interest and new business leads for residential natural gas conversions in a new market.  A small budget with an initial 3 month campaign duration was used as a test to understand the receptiveness of the market.  With this being a new market and having a high lifetime new customer value, the client was eager to generate leads.

Initially, only search was used to generate traffic, and while initally successful, the results started to taper off due to seasonal trends and demand.  Historically, the demand trend of residential natural conversions slows during the warmer months and picks back up in the fall.

Based on this trend and seeing initial campaign success in the spring, when cooler, I worked with the client to revise the campaign strategy and they were able to re-fund the project to allow for a 2nd period test that would run for 2 additional months in the late summer – early fall.

I recommended that the campaign shift from a 100% search based campaign to a full-funnel strategy targeting top and mid-funnel intent with prospecting and retargeting via display and Discovery along with search still getting the bulk of the budget at 63%.

Work Performed:

• Go-To-Market campaign strategy development
• Tag Mangement implementation with client web team
• Ad creative development 
• On-going optimization
• Campaign strategy experiements 
• Custom audience development

Results

Despite this 2nd iteration of the campaign getting 52% less total budget spread across 2 more placement types (Display & Discovery), and running for a month less than the 1st test, it was able to generate 45% more leads and reduce cost per lead 70%.