Budget New Zealand – Pay Per Click and Landing Pages – A recipe for success

The Agency Paradigm:

Back in October 2007, Budget Rent A Car was using an agency to drive their Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign.  Even though Budget’s media cost exceeded their revenue, Budget thought nothing of it.  It was a cost of marketing online, and if Budget wanted to be visible in Google, it was a necessary evil.  Budget had the same mindset for PPC as they did with offline marketing.  The Agency would add it to their communication mix to ensure the “Budget” brand was in everyone’s face, whether people were looking to rent a car or not. 

The “Push Marketing” paradigm to the Nth degree.

Everything was going fine until Avis New Zealand told Budget’s Senior Management the profit they were making in their PPC Campaign.  Avis was using Alkemi New Zealand.  As you can imagine, the Senior Management wanted to meet the Alkemi team to see if the same results could be achieved for them!!

Budget moved to Alkemi to make things happen and turn what was once a branding tool into a revenue generating machine.

Finding the Problem:

The first real problem was no analytics had been set up.  There was no way to define visitor performance once they arrived on the site.  Once Alkemi could measure visitor behaviour, the second problem became quite evident:  the site wide bounce rate was extremely high.  The Agency drove traffic to the Budget website; however, it was unqualified traffic being sent directly to the home page – major problem. 

Matching Visitor Buying Needs:

Alkemi was able to analyse the trends of keyword terms being typed into Google and sent to the Budget website.  With this information, Alkemi concluded the creation of landing pages as being a critical requirement to build relevancy for visitors.  The ability to send visitors to a page on the Budget website relevant to the keywords typed into Google, is essentially meeting the buying needs of the visitor. 

If a visitor types in “Rental Car Queenstown” then clicks on the Budget PPC advertisement and lands on the home page with no references to Queenstown, the visitor will be frustrated and will leave the site.  If the visitor goes through the same process, but this time lands on a page dedicated to renting a car in Queenstown, the website is fulfilling the buying needs of the visitor.  If the next logical step on this more relevant page is “Book Now”, there is a good chance a sale will occur.

Alkemi New Zealand and Exceed Online – the “A” Team:

Identifying the type of landing pages required for a PPC Campaign is one piece of the strategic puzzle.  Alkemi works with Exceed Online because they understand:

1) The selling process of renting a car and rearranging it to match the buying process of the visitor.
2) How to layout a page, making sure all critical information remains within the active window.
3) The art of copywriting to appeal to the visitor at unique stages of their buying process.
4) Creating persuasive links in order to draw the visitor to the next stage of the buying process.
5) Develop strong calls to action to ensure if the client wants to “Book Now”, it is clear and simple for them to know what to do next.

These are some of the elements to a landing page which the Exceed Online team are very good at creating.  Exceed Online understand Alkemi’s methodology and know what needs to be done in order to close a sale online. 
 
As the Exceed Online team created the landing pages, Alkemi was redirecting the PPC Campaign to steer as many terms away from the Home Page as possible, and landing them on the newly created pages of the Budget website.

The Results:

As the number of keywords sent to relevant landing pages increased, the site wide bounce rate, steadily decreased.

As the bounce rate steadily decreased, the conversion rate increased.  Some pages went from a bounce rate of 50% down to under 10% in one month.

As the bounce rate decreased, Budget’s Quality Score  increased.

As Budget’s quality score increased, their cost per click decreased an average of 25%.  For example, Budget’s cost for the term “Rental Car” a very competitive term for all Rental Car companies, dropped from $2.63, to $1.97, a 34% decrease (keep in mind the average position of the PPC ad remained unchanged).

The media cost of revenue which began at 120% now consistently performs below 4% month by month.

The End is Nigh:

The days of mindless spending on media are over.  Now that Alkemi New Zealand is actively preaching accountability of media spend in the market, Agencies are starting to look over their shoulders.  With whispers of a recession, Alkemi’s school of thought will become very popular very quickly. 

With Alkemi New Zealand creating the strategy and Exceed Online implementing it, dramatic results have happened and will continue to happen.