SEO + Content Case Study

33% Spike in Conversions With New Campaign Structure for Regional Financial Institution

Restructuring of paid media campaigns to prioritize consumer intent, rather than broadness of keyword, resulted in a 33% increase in conversions for a regional financial institution.

Highlights

29%

increase in click-through-rate (CTR)
33%

increase in conversions
8%

decrease in campaign cost

The Client

The Client is a financial institution with locations throughout the Southeast, providing a wide variety of deposit, lending, and investment products to individuals and businesses.

The Objective

We wanted to merge two of the Client’s top goals: Generate top-of-funnel awareness via paid advertisements for the Client’s business, while simultaneously increasing bottom-of-funnel conversions on a limited budget.

Paid Media Strategy

Remove short-tail keywords and restructure pay-per-click campaigns to focus on user intent

The Problem
The Client had a small budget and big goals. They wanted to raise brand awareness in new markets while simultaneously driving meaningful conversions in their paid media campaign. To accomplish both the Client initially wanted to target very short-tail, low-intent financial keywords. Their budget, however, was insufficient to target such broad keywords in crowded market space with high cost-per-clicks (CPC) due to competition against large, national banks.

The question became, how could we satisfy the Client’s goal of raising awareness but also have enough budget remaining to target long-tail, high-intent keywords that drive conversions?
The Solution
When we started working with the Client, we used their pre-existing data to set up an ads account primed for performance. Over time, our team was able to produce improved conversion tracking and identify emerging trends.

DTC then proposed an account restructuring to optimize the Client’s budget. The goal was to positively impact the Client’s KPIs while balancing their desire to also raise overall brand awareness.

Putting this into action, we paused all short-tail, non-serving keywords. The remaining keywords were sorted into awareness and high-intent campaigns. Not only did this allow our team to better control budget allocation, but it also allowed us to speak to these discrete intents differently.
Why it Matters
Sometimes the obvious choice isn’t the right choice when it comes to keyword targeting in a paid media strategy. In this instance, the “obvious” keywords the Client wanted to target were too expensive and too competitive to go after. By reframing and restructuring the ad account, we were able to tap into longer-tail, higher-converting keywords that demonstrated the Client’s target customers’ search intent online.

By removing non-converting keywords and reorganizing their account, we prioritized high-intent, high-converting keywords, while still maintaining visibility for the awareness-based keywords.

Results

Results compare the initial seven months after the restructured campaigns were launched to the same time frame prior. In comparing the two periods, we were able to significantly increase valuable conversions by allocating more of our limited budget toward high-intent keywords while maintaining top of funnel visibility (impressions decreased a mere 6.48% over the seven month comparison). Additionally, paid traffic increased 21%, CTR increased 29%, and conversion rate increased 34%.