Significant Growth in Registrations &
Improvements in CPA for Large Online Publisher

Lulu.com is a leading online marketplace for self-published authors, providing a platform to create, publish, and distribute print and digital content. Lulu approached Black Propeller to enhance their digital advertising strategy and drive increased registrations on their website.

• Scale Registration volume without losing sight of other conversion goals such as transaction
• Maintain an efficient Cost Per Conversion

Lulu.com faced several challenges in their advertising campaigns. The previous approach resulted in stagnant registration numbers and high costs as the campaigns lacked a clear goal. Lulu was also heavily invested in branded search (about 47% of total search spend) and noted that they wanted to reduce brand spend. Due to the under investment in non-brand search campaigns, Lulu had a generally low impression share, allowing competitors to own the SERP for top keywords and sacrificing the ability to get registrations form prospective customers.

Implementation of Best Practices:  Black Propeller put into place agency-wide best practices which significantly helps to control spend and reduce irrelevant traffic.

Shift Spend to Non-Brand: Prior to working with Black Propeller, branded spend made up about half Google search spend and 100% of Bing spend. Over the course of the partnership, Black Propeller shifted toward  non–branded spend and scaled brand spend back to  ~29% of the total spend (over Jan-May 9th).

Budget allocation was made possible because of the preparatory work that involved cleaning up the crossover of branded/non branded search term and adding extensive exclusions to prevent matching to queries potentially looking for clothing deals and other ‘lulu’ brands

Shifted Conversion Goals From A  Broad Focus To Registrations Only: Bidding strategies were a major tool that Black Propeller used to improve efficiency and increase registrations. Prior to working with Black Propeller, Lulu Publishing bidding strategies were focused on a mix of transactions, registrations and other goals. Between Jan 23′ and May 23′ over fifty five changes were made to bidding strategies across the account. A few of the changes include Google Ads experiments to test, Max Conversions vs. Maximize Value strategies, applying tROAS & tCPA and incrementally updating targets.

Expanded Keyword Portfolio: Prior to working with Black Propeller, Lulu Publishing was heavily invested in branded keywords and display campaigns which were focused more on generating awareness. Through research and analysis, Black Propeller discovered that Lulu was not winning much impression share on non-brand terms where top competitors were present.  Black Propeller identified new keyword opportunities across non-branded campaigns in USA, UK & CAN and added hundreds of non-branded terms, many of which are now  top-performers.

The collaboration between Lulu.com and Black Propeller yielded remarkable results since taking over Google & Bing Management on January 12th, 2023 allowing Lulu to scale Registrations by over 70%. Black Propeller’s approach also helped to achieve:

• Improved Campaign Efficiency due to budget allocation from display to search campaigns: CTR +310%
• Increased Conversion Rates due to strategically bidding for registration conversion actions: +135%
• A Shift From Brand to Non-Brand: Prior to working with Black Propeller, branded spend made up about half of the Google search spend and 100% of Bing spend. Brand spend has decreased to only 29% over Jan 12-May 9th. Influencing a 28% lower CPA (from $13.94 to $9.5 (May 1-30)).
• Overall Decreased CPA by -37%

Lulu Press is an online print-on-demand, self-publishing, and distribution platform.

Morrisville, NC

Publishing

PPC Management