Case Study – $100M Software Company

A $100M software company had changed its name and website and experienced its web traffic fall off to almost nothing. In order to address this situation, a combination of Pay-Per-Click and SEO (Organic) programs were quickly put in place along with email lead generation programs and webinars.

Approach Taken & Lessons Learned

The Pay-Per-Click programs targeted 25 keywords. A traffic study was done to target keywords that had sufficient traffic. Competitive research was also done to validate what keywords the competitors were going after. Campaigns were created around these keywords along with optimized landing pages to obtain a high quality score from Google and a low click-thru fee. A/B testing was done to ascertain the most effective messages and conversion rates were measured. After this was in place, an SEO program was designed to draw organic traffic on the keywords that had early success.

Results

1. It was important to not only figure out the right keywords, but to manually punch them into Google and see the type of vendors that were advertising around those words
2. PPC programs got the traffic quickly up from 100s to 1000s after the right messages were figured out
3. Having landing pages that were focused on the keywords was critical to keeping Google PPC fees down and keeping bounce rates low
4. Putting conversion and sign up fields on the landing pages instead of another page greatly improved bounce rates
5. Use of video improved conversion rates 30%
6. Leveraging keyword knowledge from PPC programs to SEO programs paid off after 4 months where SEO passed up PPC on traffic and reached 4 times the traffic
7. PPC programs required almost daily fine tuning where as SEO programs, once working, where easier to maintain
8. Good content with strong value propositions was key to both programs