Hello dear reader, Khepri Digital here with yet another Case Study, this time for the Search Ads space.
Small businesses, probably like some of our readers, barely have any time to be on the phone, and neither do they have any ad budget from the start. However, Google Ads accounts are the alternate lifeline to phone calls.
Rather than doing cold calling, Google Advertising is a potential shortcut to warmer leads. A well-done proper AdWords campaign will the target audiences to find the business easily.
This is especially so with more regulated, smaller markets like the Nursing Home industry in Singapore.
Red Crowns Senior Living was targeting seniors who might need a nursing home. However, nursing homes are generally a culturally taboo topic in dominantly Chinese cultures and are not usually talked about in everyday life. This meant that word-of-mouth, while good to start with, was not a good idea.
The campaign is in the health niche, given that it is a care service, and also stretches potentially into Dementia care. Hence, it is worth the client investment, contingent on whether we were able to get the Google Ads approved. You can read about Google's stance on Health in Personalized advertising here. This makes display advertising a bit of a stretch.
A couple of challenges then, firstly, to see the feasibility of campaign types, and getting the right customers.
The Red Crowns brands already set a certain number of Press Releases and features by local stations, so they did not lack much awareness. There was no need to generate buzz using these Google Ads and were targeted to generate leads at a reasonable cost.
Hence, there was no real incentive to run Google Display Ads, mainly focusing on Search Ads instead. Dynamic Search ads could be an option, but we go further to see why this may not be the best.
Firstly, we need to contextualize this on their website. There are 5 gateways via which enquiries can be submitted, the top 2 form submissions, and the bottom 3 direct contact. There are a few ways we can track these, but it really does depend on the number of resources available.
There are 2 form submissions on the top, and 3 direct contact options, to Call, SMS or Whatsapp us. Let's take a look at what the website looks like now. This is a screengrab that shows potential actions of interest.
Secondly, we will need to think of ways to track the sales lines via Google Tag Manager. For Calls, SMS and Whatsapp, there is a simple way which is immediately implemented or a tougher way which is more accurate.
The simpler way is to track clicks on the website. This works if the buttons are unique - for example, there is only ONE button on the website with the click text "Call" or "SMS", which is the case for this website. Given that they did not have the extra cash to pay for Call Tracking, which we will also discuss, this was not an option. However, while this is simple to implement, there are inaccuracies. For example, when the "Call" button is clicked, the phone would ask the user if he/she really wanted to call the number. It shows an additional dialogue box that the user may cancel. Hence, just because the user clicked the call button, doesn't mean he will call the company.
The tougher way, and more accurate, is the use of a Call Tracking service, such as CallRail. This means that all calls will be attributed to a channel, and is rather an attribution of the call that actually comes in, rather than us guessing from button clicks the actual number of conversions, which usually is never correct. Because all implementations are abstracted away, we will not discuss how it works here.
For forms, there are usually free solutions to attribute form submissions. In technical terms, the form submission usually triggers a Javascript event, which Google Tag Manager can catch. One such setup is here. The Gravity Forms plugin can emit the form submission as a Custom Event, which we would then have to catch via a Google Tag.
Hence, the Google Ads Account is now able to track conversions relatively well, though not at 100% capacity.
Our keywords were clear for this case. There were 4 classes of keywords
In this case, we simply extracted a list of keywords from our competitors via Ahrefs and then checked those keywords in Google Keywords Planner. We then picked out the relevant keywords that were of the correct intent segment. Because the budget was limited, we were very targeted in the way we chose keywords to advertise.
Keywords that are a little more commercial in intent didn't show that the searcher was interested in the service. These keywords include something like "Nursing Home Cost" and are simply showing an intent to discover, rather than an intent to buy. Hence, it did not make sense for us to invest money into traffic like this. We focused more on high-intent keywords such as "nursing home admission", that are significantly more revenue-generating.
The pain starts when you see this:
The health campaign is most commonly targeted via this Policy. Most campaigns, at the start, wouldn't be able to avoid such a review. In this Google ads case study, we had to pay attention to this particular Google Policy phrasing -
Personal health content, which includes:
Essentially, Google had an issue with the site for "Dementia Care". To get around this, we had to be careful of the phrases we use in the AdWords campaign. Google Ads policies will likely be triggered with the use of the words "Memory Care", or "Dementia Care", or even the use of more deliberate words like "Elder Care". We also had to be careful of Singapore's healthcare marketing guidelines.
We had to try to either avoid or rephrase these words, while also coordinating with the Google Ads representative. Eventually, we managed to get the ads approved, and the campaign ran with no problems.
When we first started running the campaigns, the results were painful for the first quarter due to a couple of reasons
Then, we were able to reduce the cost/conversion all the way down to the SGD 4-5 range with a couple of implementations.
Getting the Campaign to run is only about 20% of the real work done. The business needs the ads to be fine-tuned so that the cost per acquisition for clients would be as low as possible. Remember, the role of our PPC Agency in Singapore is to run Profitable Ads, not just to run an account and leave it be.
The key to Google Ads is "focus". Khepri Digital watches data and competition, all of which are provided by Google. We then act accordingly to what seems to make more profits for the client.
Negative keywords are one of the keys here, to help prune irrelevant searches for the client. The Google Ad Account must be managed for its success because not all Search Terms are created equal.
Let's see these two Search Terms that appeared for our campaigns.
A luxury nursing home vs a private retirement village. To generate leads, we must be able to shave down Search Terms to those that match our brands and match our client profile. For example, Red Crowns is by no means a "Luxury Nursing Home", and it reflects also, in the Cost per Conversion for this keyword. It is about 5 times higher than the cost per conversion for a "Private Retirement village".
In almost any campaign, there is about 50% of ad spend is wasted on search terms like these. The budget should be spent on keywords more relevant, to bring in higher quality traffic.
One thing that plays a big part in campaign success is the ideas and willingness to test different types. For example, Google introduced a new type of campaign known as "Dynamic Ads". This is more for businesses with no resources, nor time to look after and optimize their campaign, as we know now.
The initial view of Dynamic Ads was that it has a really low cost per conversion, and we initially thought it worked great.
However, looking at the general data, dynamic ads had the incentive to maximize leads. Looking at the Search Terms, we realized that because we could not control adwords bids in this case, the campaign bid for mainly "Brand" keywords such as "Red Crowns Senior Living". Of course, it would have a low cost per conversion, because people already knew us in the first place!
However, because of this, we realized that there is some value in running a "brand protection adwords". This is so that other assisted living vendors and nursing home vendors wouldn't bid on our brand name and snatch potential conversions away.
The cost per conversion, after the initial scare, did a lot better after we took some chances to experiment. The Blue line in this below graphic shows the trends of the cost per acquisition for the account.
A cost per acquisition of $4.74 before the end of 2022 is generally respectable, and we hope that this performance continues even after the end of 2023. However, the competition from this year onwards remains as strong as ever, and we want to hold a strong revenue share in the industry still.
There are still some improvements that we can do, such as the implementation of Call Tracking for stronger and more accurate lead attribution. As long as it doesn't go to a red line, this case study is still considered a success.
Khepri Digital Marketing is a Performance Marketing agency that cares about how we use our money. Our only goal is to squeeze sales and revenue out of a limited Ad Budget, and are certified AdWords campaign specialists. If you would like to talk to us, please check out our Google Ads Agency in Singapore.
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