Page Publishing PPC Campaign Leads to Huge Lead Gen Boost

Page Publishing is a U.S.-based book publishing company. They specialize in being a full-service publisher for both new and repeat authors that reviews manuscript submissions to be approved for publishing, and then provides major services including manuscript editing and typesetting, book cover design, hard copy distribution and eBook formatting, and more.

They came to Black Propeller to overhaul their Google Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts to create a better organized, optimized, and result-driven account structure for their lead generation initiatives. While they primarily focused on generating qualified leads in the United States targeting both English and Spanish-speaking authors, they were looking to expand internationally with lead generation campaigns in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Mexico.

This required a highly organized campaign structure, with campaigns segmented by Bottom of Funnel (BOF), Top of Funnel (TOF), and Branded keyword sets to maximize conversions in multiple stages of their funnel across all regions. In addition, this required new and improved landing pages for each region that would dynamically track conversions based on user input on our lead gen forms.

Early on, we knew that the U.S. had historically been the client’s bread and butter for driving a high volume of leads. Soon after implementing our strategy and new campaigns, we had a few challenges we needed to overcome:

1. Conversion rates for our core BOF and TOF U.S. campaigns on Google Ads were performing below average at a 7% conversion rate.
2. At the same time, the low conversion rate was resulting in $93 average cost per conversion, which was 116% higher than the previous average cost per conversion trailing in the account for comparable campaigns.
3. Digging deeper, we noticed that there were major differences in conversion rates and cost per conversion between Desktop and Mobile devices. On Desktop devices, our average conversion rate was sufficient at just over 10% with a $53 cost per conversion, while on Mobile devices our conversion rate was nearly 3 times lower than Desktop at just over 3%, and at a cost per conversion of $168 (over 3x higher than Desktop!).

After learning from these performance metrics, we knew the main issues were:

• Overall conversion rate in our BOF and TOF campaigns was not sufficient enough to meet the Page Publishing’s goals
• The large disparities between conversion rate and cost per conversion between devices, specifically on Mobile, combined with the search volume and competitiveness in our campaign keyword sets, were less cost efficient

Thinking through the main challenges our core BOF and TOF U.S. campaigns were facing, our Paid Search and Design teams came together to strategize how to best increase overall conversion rate of our landing page with an a/b test. A main culprit of low conversion rates can be your form type, which in this case was a multistep form that took users through a 3-step process before submitting their information.

Different form types, including multi-step, embedded, lightbox and others can resonate differently with specific audiences and industries. Our A/B test was set up with two variants: our “control” which utilized the original multistep form, and our “test” variant which utilized a standard embed form. Unlike the multistep form that takes users through multiple steps, an embedded form allows users to see all form fields at once on the page.

After setting up our “control” and our “test” variant, we split the traffic to an even 50/50 and set the test to run for two weeks.