When Specsavers wanted to grow brand awareness for their audiology business, they took a closer look at consumer behaviour and hatched a data-driven marketing strategy. Lear how they unearthed new insights and saw appointment bookings surge.
Aiming to achieve brand growth for their audiology business, Specsavers tasked SYZYGY with developing a digital strategy to coincide with their hearing aid sale promotion. The objective of the three-month campaign was to attract new customers, increase audiology appointments across the UK, and reduce the cost per booked appointment.
The approach
SYZYGY segmented the Specsavers website audience into four groups: leads, prospects, opportunities, and existing customers. The team then built custom audiences by isolating the most high-value users based on these site interactions.
Using demographic targeting in Google Ads, they split the campaign into key themes (hearing tests, hearing aids, and hearing loss) and by age segment to allow for flexible budget allocation. This meant they could make higher keyword bids for over-55s and secure maximum impression share on top converting terms. On an account level, they also split the activity by national targeting and localised store targeting.
To continually improve click-through rates throughout the campaign, SYZYGY rigorously tested multiple ad variations. They trialled a number of messages across the various campaign themes and optimised each individually. They also tested different landing pages against each other on the highest volume keywords.
To free up appointment slots for the over-55s who would be more likely to go on to need hearing aids immediately (and thereby represented better short-term profitability), the customer journey was altered for under-55s through the introduction of a free online hearing test screener as an additional step before booking an in-store appointment.
To maximise efficiency, SYZYGY used Search Ads 360 to automatically adjust bids for locations near Specsavers stores and for returning audiences that had been identified through Google Analytics 360. In this way, the campaign was optimised toward the goal of driving more appointments at a lower cost per acquisition.
The results
Over the duration of the sale period, the campaign produced a 218% increase in appointments booked year over year. And in spite of a 101% increase in media investment, the average cost per booked appointment dropped by 37% year over year.
This campaign has led to a number of new developments within Specsavers’ digital activity. For instance, the online hearing test screener has become part of the always-on approach. By using the online screener as the final URL for all under-55s in the hearing test segment, the brand can now provide a satisfying customer experience while keeping more appointment slots available for over-55s.
Looking ahead, the team is adopting data-driven attribution through Search Ads 360 to get a better understanding of their broad generic hearing test and hearing aid keywords. By developing custom data-driven attribution models, they hope to refine the efficiency of their generic campaigns through custom bid strategies.
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