Paid Search Strategy Increases Leads Over 330%

Learn more about how reallocating budgets on a Bing paid search campaign led to a 330% growth in leads.

overview

Fundraising Brick is a company specializing in custom-engraved brick fundraiser campaigns. They assist organizations looking to create a campaign funded by the selling of custom-engraved bricks; Fundraising Bricks handles the engraving of the bricks themselves and offers assistance marketing each fundraiser campaign. This campaign could be anything from setting up a fundraiser to create a brick walkway to a church to creating a brick memorial wall.

Because Fundraising Brick is in a niche market, finding the right target audience can be on the challenging side.

Problem

A decrease in paid search leads over Q4 in 2023.

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Solution

Implement a new avenue of paid search through Bing.

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Results

A 330% increase in leads after advertising on Bing.

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The Problem

From September to December 2023, there was a 47% decrease in leads from paid search.

As the fall and winter months approached, we noticed a lack of inquiries from Google Ads. After testing new ad copy and new keywords, we still noticed that nothing changed. We ruled out from this testing that seasonality and market trends were not causes for the dip. We knew we needed to create a new out-of-the-box strategy to combat this decline.

What better way to combat this issue?

A new avenue of advertising we hadn’t done for Fundraising Brick–Bing Ads!

THE SOLUTION

Our paid search team introduced Bing as a new avenue for paid search in January 2024, to start the new year.

Our team noticed that Bing Ads offered success for other clients in different verticals. We hoped that success would transfer to Fundraising Brick with the right strategy and implementation. Specifically, we saw Bing Ads as an avenue for success because one struggle for Fundraising Brick was the higher cost per lead on Google Ads… which would be less of an issue on Bing Ads, making Bing the best place to test our paid search strategy.

Bing Ads are not as mainstream as Google Ads because the vast majority of searchers use Google, not Bing. In fact, Bing only holds just over 7% of search engine market share in the United States, Google holds a whopping 87%. Most advertisers see this discrepancy and drop Bing Ads as a viable route for leads.

We saw past this discrepancy to see opportunity. And it’s because we understood our target audience. Our target audience leans older, has more disposable income, and uses Microsoft applications. These 3 characteristics overlap with Bing’s typical users, who are often older, wealthier, and prefer Microsoft compared to Google users. Even better, because there are less advertisers on Bing Ads, we had less competition and lower costs per lead.

The best part of this strategy? We didn’t need to ask the client for more money for a Bing campaign. We just reallocated $500 from our $2500 Google budget to Bing, and saw quick growth in leads from the get-go. Not only could we generate more leads from our budget, but we could also generate them at a lower cost per click (CPC).

Once we began to see growth (139% increase in engagements, to be precise), we decided to move more of the budget from Google to Bing. The leads just kept growing.

THE RESULT

By the end of April, in just four short months of the campaign, we’d seen over a 330% growth in quality leads.

Our client saw month-over-month growth with Google and Bing leads combined, including a:

232% increase in leads from December (28) to April (93)
200% increase in leads from January (39) to February (56)
119% increase in leads from February (56) to March (67)
138% increase in leads from March (67) to April (93)

paid search engagements

By the end of April, 25% of search inquiries were from Bing. That’s 25% more opportunity and visibility that we missed out on prior to the new campaign.

The best part (again)?! All of the leads from Bing were for less money. The average CPC in December with Google alone was $5.30. In April, the average CPC total was $2.23 ($1.23 for Bing, and $2.83 for Google). Talk about a decrease for each click!

paid search cpc

THE CONCLUSION

While this strategy may seem as simple as advertising on a different search engine, it made a great difference in what we were able to achieve for Fundraising Brick. Finding where the client’s target market searches the most–and meeting them there–created so much more opportunity for Fundraising Brick, and at a lower overall CPC.

At Digital Strike, we help clients establish their digital presence and provide solutions to create opportunities for your business. Whether it’s lead-generation, an SEO strategy or an entire digital marketing plan, we have the team to deliver you results.