Exploring the Potential Impact of Google AdWords Online Video Ads

Last December, PPC Essentials, Portent’s pay-per-click service offering designed for growing small businesses, took a leap of faith in positioning ourselves as an entity offering services separately from Portent’s enterprise-level internet marketing services. One essential element of this transition was to create a new website for ourselves that would completely separate us from Portent’s main domain, eigene-homepage-erstellen.net.

The Problem

Operating as a standalone service under the Portent brand name, PPC Essentials had been earning the majority of its sales leads through the authority and name recognition built up by Ian Lurie and Portent’s clout.

Once we moved to a new domain without that authority and brand recognition fully attached to the program, visitor volume on the newly created ppc-essentials.com was slow to gain traction and inbound leads were down.

Facing a lack of brand awareness and identity in the competitive space of PPC management, the PPC Essentials team looked for fast and effective ways to create awareness in an effort to drive high quality website visits and, in turn, sales leads.

This problem may be one that many of you face with your own businesses which is why I have laid out a tactic we approached in an effort to drive brand awareness and in the end, lead generation.

The Solution

YouTube Video Campaigns through Google AdWords.

Featuring a 60-second service demo video, we developed a promotion strategy designed to outreach our video and service though in-search, in-display, and in-stream ad options on YouTube.

Targeting similar demographics in line with our current program personas in combination with targeted keywords closely related to our core service and the problem we solve, we ran a three week trial promoting our video.

The Results

We were blown away by what happened next.

The following statistics are from the entire three week campaign and are compared to the three weeks prior to launching our video advertisements:

The improvement in our onsite engagement statistics was great but, at the end of the day, what we really cared about was seeing an increase in lead generation.

Let’s look at those lead generation statistics.

Onsite conversion rate over that same time frame doubled and then some:

Not only did those new visits convert at a higher rate on their first visit to the site, but driving a new influx of visitors allowed us to fill our remarketing pool as well.

Those visitors who came back to the site through a remarketing ad converted at a rate four and a half times higher than those remarketed to before we activated our YouTube ads.

Those sharp increases in conversion rates coupled with a flood of new visitors created exactly the results that we were looking for. The leads generated during the three-week campaign increased substantially, providing work for our sales team and a new marketing weapon to use in our arsenal.

By segmenting a highly targeted audience identified through client personas, understanding the market we work in and problem we solve for small business owners and marketing managers, PPC-Essentials was able to increase lead generation volume by 450% through the promotion of a 60-second service demo video over a three-week Google AdWords Online Video ad campaign.

Segmenting those same demographics and targeting for your business, as well as creating a short and engaging demo video, can provide you with the weaponry to drive further awareness and conversions on your emerging website.