How to Grow a Business Through a PPC Conversion Model

A challenge for any business and their Finance Director or Accountant is to able to predict and forecast sales growth so that you can develop and scale business in a planned and profitable way.

Due to the precise way that you can target and measure digital marketing activities, with the right integrated strategy you should be able to do this and Zelst always look to build a strong model that is profitable, sustainable and scalable in every campaign that we develop.

This case study illustrates how we built that model and also demonstrates the sustainability and longevity of the biddable media strategy.

An ecommerce business in the health and beauty sector, has been built from scratch to become a leader in their field. They have been working with Zelst for over 6 years, originally engaging Zelst when they were suffering from declining organic traffic.

Their previous high profile digital marketing agency had introduced a Google PPC campaign in order to mitigate some of the sales lost from the declining organic traffic, however they were unhappy with the targeting of the campaign and the poor return that they were achieving on their paid search investment.

Having created and developed an SEO strategy for the business which starting to bear fruit, they asked Zelst to take over their PPC activity and improve the campaigns

We have worked with Zelst for a number of years. Their willingness and ability to provide strategic direction for our ongoing campaigns make them valued partners . . . . and they are also, really nice people!

All of the Zelst team play an important part of our strategies, as they are all very competent and knowledgeable in their own area of expertise. Our main point of contacts are Peter and Sophie. Both are extremely diligent and completely trust their work ethic. All in all, a great team!

Health and Beauty
Managing Director

Although the data from the existing Google Ads campaigns was useful, the targeting, ad copy and general structure of the Account was very poor and, in our opinion, was destined to fail.

Using the data to understand what had worked and what hadn’t, discussing what promotion and advertising they wanted and did not want, analysing the sales data that we had, and then reviewing the product range, opportunities and competitive landscape, we were able to create a wide range of new campaigns and ad groups that we could start to roll out and test. This we started to do in the back end of 2013 and by early 2014, the campaigns were delivering sales at the targeted cost of sale and achieving a strong return on investment.

Gradually the activity was scaled up, more brand promotion was introduced, a much wider range of targeted products was introduced via multiple Google Shopping Campaigns and some of the poorer returning generic advertising was scaled back.

Our client was delighted with the results and decided that rather than give Zelst strict monthly budgets, they would set them a target viable Cost of Sale (COS) or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), that would allow them to grow the business in a profitable way without constraining potential growth via budgetary concerns.

By 2015, Zelst were delivering a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) of 11.07 (1,106.66%) at a cost of sale (COS) of 9.04%, with an annual increase in revenue from paid traffic of 94.5% and an increase in google click costs of just 33.65%.

Zelst have been able to maintain this over the past four years, in fact the ROAS for the last two months was exactly 11.07 and the cost of sale was 9.03%, although the annual increase in revenue from Paid was significantly higher!

We call it PPPC or Perfect Pay Per Click :

Profitable, Predictable, Planned and Controlled