In November 2022 we were approached by a Geotechnical contracting company called BLOC Contractors. They offer specialised services to the construction industry. The managing director got in touch with us and asked if we could meet up with him to discuss marketing and a website. 

He told us that he wasn’t showing up on Google when people searched for the company, and that his website didn’t do a good enough job at showing the quality of the company. 

After the website was built we took over the Google Ads from another agency, at the time the Google Ads were as follows:

They were putting R6000 ($315) per month into a campaign targeting all their services. But, as we found out when we took over, they were optimising for “Impressions’ ‘ (The number of people who see the ad). 

Which in this case was a bad move, they weren’t even tracking the number of people who actually contacted them from the website after clicking on an ad.

Google Ad Performance 3 months before we took over:

So, to be honest, the Ads were burning money

Since BLOC still wanted to show up on Google in front of potential customers, we decided to carry on with the Google Ads that they were running after we finished with the website.

But, we needed to improve them to see tangible results.

We started the ads again at the end of March 2023.

Before we took over they were running a “broad match” ad campaign on all of the services. It was optimised for impressions. This means that they were trying to show the ads to as many people as possible.

This is almost never the right call. 

They were spending R6000 ($315) per month to get an average of 450 clicks, and an unknown number of people contacting them from the website (0 measured leads).

Here’s what we did to fix that:

• Most importantly we started tracking when people made contact with them from the website. We then linked it to Google Ads so that the machine learning algorithm could start to optimise for more leads, rather than more impressions.
• We changed some of the broad match keywords to phrase match keywords. Meaning they would only show when people searched for exactly the service, and not something similar. We were able to focus the ads and show them to the people who were actually looking for BLOC’s services.

We reduced the monthly budget to R3000 ($155), and were still able to get a similar number of clicks, but more importantly we started tracking it, so it allowed the Google Ads machine to optimise for the right thing. 

It took a bit of time, but the results were definitely worth it.

About 3 months into running the ads I got a message from the client that read…

“We’re starting to see a lot of queries coming through the website, this must be because of the Google Ads?”

The first year was just a testing period. We ran ads on all their services to see which were getting the most leads and more importantly, which actually became customers.

The results after the first year were as follows.

23.3K Impressions

1820 Clicks

27 Leads Forms were submitted

This resulted in a Conversion rate of 4.02%. That means 4.02% of people who clicked on the ad became a lead.

At the end of the first year, after some vital input from the client, we started to be more specific about which services we wanted to target. We narrowed down our keywords, redid their website again and continued running the ads. This has had an incredible effect. 

The new website went live at the end of February.

Over the two months that followed It went from an average of 5 leads per month to 21 solid leads.

Here’s the Stats:

7.83K Impressions

662 Clicks

95 Leads Forms were submitted

This resulted in a Conversion rate of 14%. That means 14% of people who clicked on the ad became a lead.

Of course, not all these were qualified leads. 

Of the 95, 21 were genuinely interested in the services and some became customers. More leads means more conversations with potential customers.

21 new leads over two months. When compared to 27 leads in the previous year. That’s a pretty big deal. We’re super proud of the work we’re doing with this company. 

We are committed to keep improving on these results and improving our service overall.

If you’re wondering “Would Google Ads work for my business”:

Google Ads worked really well for this business. But it only worked well because people are looking for the services they offer on Google. 

If you’re not sure about whether your business could benefit from Google Ads, get in touch with us