INCREASED PROFITS & LOWER CPAAlgorithmic management of paid search yields

A Paid Search Case Study

Industry: Insurance

Market: Kansas City, MO

Case Date: 2017

Services: Comprehensive personal insurance

Company OverviewThe company is a billion dollar, national insuranceagency whose agents carry appointments across 12different product industries. All insurance sales happen over the phone, and all the leads are generated via avariety of lead generation platforms.

ObjectivesThe company saw rapid growth of agents and, as a result, a massive increase in marketing budget to support the growing agent force. Google AdWords and Bing PPC were used and managed by a team of marketing specialiststhat also were assigned other digital duties. The dramatic increase in overall PPC spend and time to manage was costing the company an exorbitant amount of time and money. These individuals utilized closed-loop reporting to make estimations about how to adjust bids, and create and manage campaigns. This solution was not onlycumbersome and diffi cult to manage, but also not opti-mized towards the company’s long-term production goals. New keyword creation, pausing of campaigns, and ad copy management was done manually.

SolutionsThe solution was to develop machine learning algorithms to forecast impressions, clicks,conversions, insurance quotes, and policy submissions. After forecasting models were built out, a series of machine learning classifi cation models were constructed to predict the probability that a given keyword would lead to a click, conversion, and ultimately an underwritten policy.Finally, these models were mapped to a series of non-linear profi t equations, where eachequation represented the probabilistic profi t given a bid of a single keyword. These predictions and optimization were done daily to generate daily bids. The only manual input was the desired daily budget. Using internal data about the profi tability of a policy by zip code and other emographic data, we could target high areas of the country. An additional daily screener was put in place to make intraday adjustments in the event that volume or conversion rates were too low. This intraday screener served to stabilize anomalous events. An automated keyword creation engine added keywords based on the search term reports of both AdWords and Bing, andcreated new single keyword ad groups automatically. Finally, closed-loop reporting engines and dashboard were made. The dashboards allowed marketing individuals to monitor theperformance of these systems, and alerting systems would send out SMS and emailnotifi cations to alert users of any system failures.

ResultsThe company went from $5,000 a day in marketing spend to well over $30,000 a day. Thenumber of keywords increased from about 10,000 to well over 500,000 keywords. Theconversion rates increased 5% from manually managed levels. While the spend saw an increase of ten times in under a year, the cost per acquisition saw a 15% decrease, and profi tsincreased fourfold.

INCREASE IN SITE TRAFFICSmart long-term SEO strategies lead to huge

An SEO Case Study

Industry: Title Loans

Market: Kansas City, MO & Kanas City, KS

Case Date: August 2016

Services: Providing extra cash throughcar title loans

Company OverviewThis client has been providing quick and convenient title loans in the Kansas City area since 1997. With sixdifferent locations across the metro, their goal is to please consumers by being the most flexible andcustomer-friendly title loan provider in the region.

ObjectivesAfter building a new website from the ground up, the client was looking to increase organic traffi c to their new site. Being unfamiliar with the world of search engineoptimization, the client was relying on our expertise to drive new customers to their site, and ultimately increase foot traffi c to their stores.

SolutionsSince the client had never had search engine optimization work done on their old site or their new one, our team started from the ground up with industry best-practices. From modifying meta titles and descriptions, to adding alt tags to each image, our SEO team did extensive work to ensure increased site traffi c. Our skilled content writers also re-wrote every page of the site to include both industry- and location-specifi c keywords, as well as added several new pages of content that could be indexed by search engines.

ResultsOver a period of six months, the client has seen a 51% increase in site traffi c — on average, 80% of that traffi c has come from new users. Additionally, the client has seen a 10% decrease in bounce rate, and their average session duration has increased by over a minute and a half.Because of the success of our SEO work, the client now utilizes our team for their other three properties’ websites, which have also seen a comparable increase in traffi c since ourteam’s takeover.