Colombo & Hurd, a law firm based in Florida, spent 30 minutes setting up a new bidding and targeting strategy with Google Adwords enhanced campaigns. It paid off in spades. Within just one month, the firm's mobile clickthrough rate grew by 53% during peak hours and its mobile conversion rate tripled, while the cost-per-click was reduced by 13.5%.
Goals
Increase number of in-office consultations
Improve advertising performance on all screens
Customize bidding strategies for time, location, and device
Approach
Upgraded to AdWords enhanced campaigns
Used mobile-specific calls to action feature
Used calls to conversions feature to see how ads impact conversions
Results
Developed a new bidding and targeting strategy in less than 30 minutes
Increased rate of mobile conversions by 3x
Raised mobile CTR 53% and lowered mobile CPC 13.6%
Founded in 2006, Colombo & Hurd, PL is a law firm headquartered in Orlando, Florida, with another office in Miami and two in South America. The firm dedicates itself to serving people and businesses through its law practice. Colombo & Hurd’s main clients include corporations and families in need of legal counsel and defense.
Enhancing campaign performance
Attorneys at Colombo & Hurd have a singular goal with their paid search campaigns: for potential clients to contact the firm and schedule an in-office consultation. Like many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the firm wanted to focus its AdWords efforts on achieving its advertising goal, but it lacked the time and staff to do so. Colombo & Hurd required a lightweight and easy way to improve performance, and found a solution in AdWords enhanced campaigns.
Making the upgrade
Colombo & Hurd teamed up with its paid search software and services partner, WordStream, a Google Certified Partner, to make the upgrade to enhanced campaigns in April 2013. Enhanced campaigns enable advertisers to customize bidding strategies for time, location, and device — all from a single campaign.
It all started with mobile
Colombo & Hurd knew that mobile ads were a key driver of in-office consultations, so the team took a number of steps to improve their mobile advertising performance. First, they set their mobile bid adjustments to 25% higher than desktop bids. Then, they made changes to their ads to make them more relevant for mobile users. They used call extensions to link their business phone number with their ads, and created mobile-preferred ads to add a mobile-specific call to action for on-the-go searchers. In this case, they added the words “Call Now” to ads viewed on mobile phones. With this setup, they could now receive phone calls from ad clicks.
Colombo & Hurd looked into other ways to determine how their ads lead to conversions. Conversions are something the business considers valuable, like a click or a phone call. In order to quantify the value of mobile ads, the firm took advantage of the calls as conversions feature to designate calls lasting longer than 180 seconds as conversions. This armed the Colombo & Hurd with concrete data on multiple ways mobile ads were valuable to the firm.
Timing is everything
After refining its mobile strategy, the firm next sought to make improvements to its campaigns based on time of day. The team believed calls made during daytime office hours, when a lawyer was available to screen potential clients, tended to be the most valuable. For this reason, they used bid adjustments to increase bids by 20% between the hours of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m when the office was open. They kept bids at their standard levels when the office was closed.
Location, location, location
The firm further wanted to be able to show its ads to potential clients who would be most likely to come in for an in-office consultation — people within driving range of the firm. In order to do this, the team set up radius targeting to reach searchers within a 5, 20, and 50-mile radius around the Orlando office. The firm is currently analyzing data from these location targets to identify trends, and plans on using this information to set location bid adjustments in the future.
It was painless to make the switchover to AdWords enhanced campaigns and it also greatly simplified our campaign management.
Instant upgrade
“The entire process of optimizing the firm’s device, time, and location bid strategy took less than 30 minutes,” said WordStream’s Success Manager, Erin Sagin. The process was also easy for Colombo & Hurd: “It was painless to make the switchover to AdWords enhanced campaigns,” says Rusten C. Hurd, founding partner, “and it also greatly simplified our campaign management.”
Delivering high performance
Within a month, the firm’s results with enhanced campaigns were overwhelmingly positive. The new ads delivered top performance, with a high average position.
One interesting finding was that a high proportion of the firm’s traffic — 42% — came from mobile devices. The team quickly decided to adapt more ad groups for mobile and develop an improved, mobile-friendly website.
The firm’s mobile statistics were also positive. With enhanced campaigns, mobile clickthrough rate (CTR) rose 53%, while cost-per-click (CPC) fell 13.6%. Overall, mobile conversion rate increased 3x while cost-per-acquisition (CPA) dropped by 149%.
Continuing to upgrade
Moving to AdWords enhanced campaigns has shown the value of mobile traffic in Colombo & Hurd’s client acquisition efforts. The firm will continue migrating ad groups and campaigns to multiscreen campaigns, while continuing to refine time and location bids. “The vast majority of clients find us through Google,” Hurd says. “We’re thrilled with AdWords enhanced campaigns. I’m really happy to have made the upgrade.”
