The Background

Steuben Press is a Colorado-based book printer that specializes in custom book printing for self-published authors.

In 2014, BKMedia Group designed and developed a website for Steuben Press. One of the website’s primary features is a quote calculator to provide potential customers with book printing prices and collect leads for Steuben Press.

Thanks to content optimization for search visibility, the site saw a fair amount of leads from organic and direct traffic after launch, which helped generate new business for Steuben Press.

To further increase sales, we developed an AdWords (now Google Ads) search marketing campaign to drive more new leads and business to Steuben Press. However, when paid search campaigns were first launched, costs per lead were erratic and often expensive.

The Execution

The initial paid campaign targeted a variety of keywords, each divided into their own ad groups with multiple ads. Over three years, as keywords and ads collected data, we continually determined key areas for improvement and applied optimizations to all facets of the campaign.

Ads were continually revised and rewritten based on cost per click and/or click-through rate. The worst performing ads were scrapped, and new variations of the best performing ads were written to test against the originals.

We regularly monitored which search terms resulted in our ads being shown, and applied negative keywords or changed how we targeted certain terms or phrases by updating our keyword match types. These kinds of changes helped to ensure we weren’t wasting money on irrelevant keywords.

Over the course of three years, these and other optimizations resulted in a 175.27% increase in the paid conversion rate (from 1.38%  to 3.80%) and a 28.57% reduction in the cost per lead.

Once performance had stabilized, a new landing page was developed and tested against the new baseline. Again, improvements were seen in both conversion rate and cost per lead that proved itself to drive a conversion rate at a lower cost.

Objectives

• Drive more quote submissions (leads) at a lower cost per quote
• Turn paid search into a cost-effective and sustainable channel for new business

The Result

Comparing August 2014 (when paid search was first implemented) to August 2018, lead submissions increased by 1,200%, with a 288.59% improvement in the conversion rate (from 1.38% to 5.37%), and average cost per lead also fell by 45%.