Google Ads Case Study in The Digital Forensics Niche

Service:

Google ADS audit, setup and optimization. Google Analytics 4 & Google Tag Manager setup.

Business area:

Digital forensics services.

Niche features:

• The target audience is lawyers who represent their clients and try to find evidence that will influence the court’s decision;
• Expensive topic, average CPC in the search network is from $10 to $30.

GEO: USA
Monthly ad budget: $8000
Goals: Increase the number of leads with Google ADS without increasing the monthly advertising budget
Input data: A client came with a request to audit his Google Ads account, since he spends $8,000 a month on advertising and receives an overwhelming number of irrelevant calls and requests

What Was Done Before Working With Our Agency

###The Google Ads account was set up with:

• 38 search campaigns with ad groups on common queries;
• 1 dynamic search campaign with site index targeting;
• 2 Google Display Network (GDN) campaigns;
• 3 Smart сampaigns;
• A goal to track the number of Calls from Ads;

The Google Analytics account was set up with:

• A goal to track the number of visits to the contact page.

Results before working with our agency

Results for 1 month (14.03.2023 — 14.04.2023):

• Clicks — 1474;
• Conversion rate — 1.09%;
• Cost per conversion — $447;
• Conversions - 16 (Only Calls from Ads conversion was tracked in Google Ads, and in Google Analytics only the goal for visits to the Contact Us page was set up, which does not show the actual number of contacts with the client);

What our agency has done

First of all, we audited the Google Ads account and here’s what we found out:

• The names of the advertising campaigns and groups were incoherent and unstructured, often the name consisted only of numbers, which did not make it possible to understand at first glance what exactly the previous Google Ads specialist was launching and testing.
  
• The dynamic search campaign was targeting blog pages that were bringing non-converting traffic and wasting the advertising budget.
  
• Search queries were not cleaned or added to negative keywords. Users often came to the website looking for products from Adobe or AI services. Unfortunately this resulted in the loss of thousands of dollars.
  
• Some keywords launched were irrelevant and brought untargeted traffic. Here are a few of them: forensics jobs, forensic training, history of forensic science.
  

We began auditing the installed analytics on the website and found that our client was unable to track and analyze incoming leads because the existing Google Analytics was set up at an entry level. In addition, the client’s Google Ads account only had a goal set up to track Calls from Ads conversions, and there was nothing else in Google Analytics besides data on the number of visits to the Contact US page.

On top of that, the website had an old version of Google Analytics installed, which Google was going to abandon in the coming months, so it was urgent to install and configure the new Google Analytics 4. For quick and flexible customization of analytics, we installed Google Tag Manager (GTM) on the website. In it, we created all the necessary variables, triggers and tags that allowed us to track all the necessary data in Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads. The most important thing for us was to track and analyze the source of leads and their quality so that we can further optimize advertising campaigns, so we created these custom events to track conversions:

• tel_click (event name) - Event to track clicks by phone number;
• contact_page_form_submit (event name) - Event to track form submission on the contact page;
• legal_matters_form_submit (event name) - Event to track form submission for legal matters;
• personal_matters_form_submit (event name) - Event to track form submission for personal matters;

We turned off all the old ad campaigns and started from scratch. We studied in detail every service that Garrett Discovery provides and did in-depth keyword research. Our client actively participated in keyword research and helped us to understand controversial and ambiguous variants. We grouped all keywords into categories and launched search advertising campaigns, which brought results in the first few days.

We launched remarketing on Google Display Network as well as search dynamic remarketing. This helped to increase the number of leads without much increase in the advertising budget.

Results after working with our agency

In 6 months of working with Garrett Discovery, we managed to achieve excellent results. A competent audit allowed us to draw the right conclusions and showed us in which direction we should move in order to achieve a positive result.

As a result, the client stopped receiving irrelevant calls and wasting advertising budget on non-target clicks. Constant optimization of advertising campaigns from the beginning of their launch and testing allowed us to increase the conversion rate from 3% to 12%, the client began to receive even more leads with the same advertising budget.

Results for the first 2 weeks (15.04.2023 — 30.04.2023):

• Clicks — 324;
• Conversion rate — 2.78%;
• Cost per conversion — $201;
• Conversions - 9;

Results for the last 2 weeks (1.10.2023 — 15.10.2023):

• Clicks — 413;
• Conversion rate — 11.67%;
• Cost per conversion — $85.17;
• Conversions - 48.21;

Results for 6 months (15.04.2023 — 15.10.2023):

• Clicks — 5650;
• Conversion rate — 7.57%;
• Cost per conversion — $117;
• Conversions - 435;