Case Study: Google Ads for a Landscape Lighting Company
Background
An outdoor lighting company wanted to increase visibility in the end of buyer journey searches on Google Ads. While their SEO (search engine optimization) wasn’t of value yet, this lighting company wasn’t ranking for important keywords like landscape lighting.
How We Helped
For this outdoor lighting company, we researched high volume, low cost keywords that both correlate to their lighting services and represent the end of the sales journey, meaning not research-like keywords, but rather ready to buy keywords. For each keyword, we created a group of ads to test out which one would work best. In the Google ad world, this approach is called Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGS). And then we built or used existing landing pages that are optimized for the keyword in the ad — all translating to lower cost click and higher performing ads.
Locations were an important part of this Google Ads campaign — and rather than choosing a radius, we chose all the cities in the radius that met the income requirements — regardless of the city’s population size.
For some keywords, we went a step further and added a city to the keyword in the ad and in the landing page.
The secret ingredient to every amazing Google Ads campaign? Negative keywords. We won’t share all of the ones we use for this campaign, but here are some: Home Depot, Lowes, and table.
A good CTR (click through rate) in the Google ad world is 2.5% or higher. We optimized these campaigns to a CTR of almost 7%! The higher the CTR, the lower cost per click. High CTR also helps make sure that your ads are relevant — meaning they’re being shown to people who actually have an interest in the words in your ad — so it’s a checkmark that you’ve got the right set of keywords, negative keywords, and a great ad.
The keywords we ended up with were highly competitive — so our cost per clicks averaged on the high side. However, we decreased it by about 20% from the first month to the fourth.
