Our Approach
Because the campaign was already established, with our management beginning and ending during the busiest period of the year and some limitations to conversion tracking; we knew that large scale changes would have to be rolled out gradually and consistently as to not disrupt performance during a key period. Here are some of the key actions we implemented with our time on the campaign;
We trialed a number of new automated bidding strategies to ensure we were getting the best performance out of each and every campaign. These tests were done gradually over the course of a 2 month period to ensure that we minimsed disruption whilst gaining the necessary insights.
We expanded the clients campaign targeting into more granular campaign sets. With a heavy emphasis on international students from multiple counties internationally, we saw benefit by segmenting campaigns into each international country that was targeted, rather than targeting all of the ‘rest of world’ nations in a single campaign. One of the key benefits of this was that it allowed us to create individual ad schedules per country which wasn’t possible with the previous set up, whilst also making reporting much clearer for the client too.
We also introduced campaigns to target each of the London properties individually. Previously, only the largest properties were split out with their own campaigns, however we saw an opportunity to improve performance further across the account by creating a campaign for every property and did so.
With lots of display activity on the account, we wanted to ensure the quality of traffic was premium and therefore conducted a full review of the display performance, including analysis from our click fraud prevention partner PPC Protect. The insights from this research were very useful, uncovering that over 90% of the fraudulent traffic that the account was experiencing were coming from display campaigns that targeted international locations. PPC Protect found that over 10% of the budget was currently being spent on invalid or suspicious traffic.
