contextual advertising or “word of mouth”? How to attract 20+ major clients for a printing house in two months
We are sure that many companies' first experience with contextual advertising was not the most successful: money was spent, but there was little return. This is especially true in the B2B segment, where the cost of attraction is high. This story is exactly about B2B, and it also started unsuccessfully. The first month of the advertising campaign disappointed both us and our client, who had no experience with contextual advertising before and was promoted mainly through word of mouth. Below, we will show a specific example of why contextual advertising can lead to a drain on the budget and what we did to correct the situation and ultimately bring in 20+ new B2B clients with large orders: the average bill is ~50,000 rubles with the cost of attracting a lead of about 4,000 rubles.
The story will be in three parts:
Failure: How We Wasted Our Budget and Why. Spoiler: In this case, it was the website that wasn't converting traffic into leads.
Marketing tricks: what and how to change on a website so that it works effectively.
Technical tricks: what and how to change in the campaign settings to optimize it for both macro and micro goals. At the same time, we will tell you about our own tool under the code name “makosec” (and even share our code).
In general, if you are from the B2B sphere and have either never encountered contextual advertising, or have encountered it but were disappointed – welcome under the cut.
First of all: who is the customer and why does he need contextual advertising?
The customer is a Moscow printing house that has been working in the B2B segment for 15 years. The printing house is interested in long-term cooperation with large clients who need a range of printing services, from business cards to large banners and merch. For example, one of such clients is a well-known comedy TV show.
In general, the printing house is serious, with a comprehensive approach, an established customer base and good word of mouth. All this allowed maintaining current financial indicators, but not increasing them. To scale up, the customer decided to try a new channel for itself – contextual advertising.
While searching for a contractor we came across our case for another printing house and wanted the same. The goal of the new campaign is quite specific – to increase sales in the B2B segment. Moreover, you need to aim specifically at large orders, and not one-off printing in small print runs.
They say the site is non-converting!
Naturally, the first thing we did was study the customer's website. Doubts about its conversion rate arose immediately.
The most important thing is that the website initially had incorrect positioning: the printing house did not offer a range of printing services for large B2B clients – on the contrary, it explicitly offered services to private clients with print runs starting from one copy.
With small print runs, contextual advertising is unprofitable – the cost of a lead is not offset by the profit from such a small order:
the average bill for printing services is up to 5,000 rubles (circulation of business cards is about 2,000, small banners – 3,000-5,000);
cost of a lead – in this case it fluctuated from 4,000 to 12,000 rubles (below we will tell you where this range comes from).
There were other errors on the site:
weak USPs that did not reflect the needs of the target audience;
there was no well-thought-out user path through the site with well-placed calls to action that would lead the client through the sales funnel;
Finally, the site is quite outdated visually.
However, despite all this, the customer considered his site good enough and insisted that we launch advertising. Well, for the first time we did not insist and listened to the customer: we collected semantics and started setting up the campaign.
The first pancake is always lumpy: launching with an old site
B2B clients usually call, and even more often leave a request by email or through the website. Therefore, when setting up a campaign in this segment, it is imperative to track email tracking and call tracking. For this, a composite macrogoal is needed – it allows you to collect the required number of conversions for training automatic strategies and campaign optimization.
We have successfully assembled a composite macro-goal and set up advertising campaigns by tools:
Search,
Campaign Master,
RSY,
Product campaign,
EPC (unified performance campaign),
Retargeting.
Initially, everything was set up according to macro-conversions – key target actions of the user:
calls,
applications on the website,
letters to e-mail.
If it’s still difficult to say anything after the first week, then after 2-3 weeks it became clear that the site wasn’t converting.
We tracked visitors by the stages of the funnel and were convinced: the ads themselves work well, they are clickable, and specifically for target queries. But when going to the site, half of the visitors (or even more) fly off the hook, the bounce rate was around 50-60%.
We reduced some of this bounce rate by simply cleaning up search queries. Now the ads were seen by an even more targeted audience. And still, the bounce rate was at ~40%. And even those who stayed on the site spent less than 60 seconds on it.
The disappointing intermediate result: 4 out of 10 visitors left the site immediately, the rest spent less than a minute on it, found nothing and did not leave requests.
It smelled like a drain on the budget. We told the customer: this way we would either end up with no requests at all, or they would be indecently expensive. The customer believed in his website and suggested pushing harder: like, now is the season's slump, we need to keep going, it's definitely not about the website.
After another week, we were finally convinced: there was no point in hanging around any longer, it would be better to spend part of the allocated budget on a new site, after which we could resume the campaign. The customer initially resisted, but eventually accepted our arguments and gave the go-ahead for the creation of a new site.
Site 2.0: Turning the Tide in Your Favor
So, we took a break from advertising and focused on the site. Our main task is for it to convert traffic into requests.
Where we started:
conducted an interview with the company owner and sales manager;
conducted castdev (studied the needs and wishes of the target audience in order to understand which site would satisfy their requests);
conducted an analysis of competitors' websites in the narrow niche of B2B printing houses;
studied customer reviews on platforms like Otzovik and the like.
All this allowed us to identify the pain points and objections of the target audience, as well as formulate the right message. Based on this information, we created a prototype, agreed on it with the customer and implemented it in the form of a simple and clear website specifically for the needs of our target audience (large B2B clients).
Now, point by point, what exactly we changed.
First, we made a clear positioning: we tailored all messages on the site to the B2B segment. On the new site, we specifically targeted new clients who need a range of services, not just a bunch of business cards.
Secondly, we took into account the wishes, pains and objections of the client – and reflected them in the USP and the corresponding blocks of the site. Now the visitor saw a clear and understandable scenario of interaction with the printing house.
Thirdly, as we mentioned above, we added a call to action button to each screen where it makes sense. A well-thought-out user path appeared on the site, now the visitor could conveniently and quickly contact the company.
Finally, the new site, compared to the old one, has a more modern visual design and clear navigation.
At this stage of the project, we considered that the new site meets the stated goals:
matches the target audience,
matches the messages in the ads,
converts traffic.
It remained to be tested in practice.
Second launch with a new website: proving that contextual advertising is better than word of mouth
At first, for the sake of the experiment's purity, we did not change anything in the campaign settings. Well, at most, we added an additional list of negative words. We launched campaigns on the same macroconversions – and even under such conditions, the new site immediately began to generate requests, from the very first launch. Which was to be proven: the problem was in the old site, the new one works much more efficiently.
Then the question of optimization arose: there are not many applications in the B2B segment, it is necessary to optimize in order to increase the effectiveness of the entire campaign as a whole.
It is known that for training within one campaign 10 conversions per week should be achieved. Macrogoals for such a number are often not enough to train Yandex algorithms, so it is necessary to additionally optimize for microconversions.
Microgoals help to understand what the visitor is doing from the moment he arrives on the site until he performs the target action. In turn, this helps to evaluate the effectiveness of each stage of the sales funnel. One of the microgoals that correlates well with macrogoals and overall visitor interest is time spent on the site.
Yandex.Metrica itself cannot create events based on the duration of a user's visit to a site; there is no such goal in the default sets. Metrica can count the time on a site, but it cannot create goals based on it. To close this gap, we have developed our own counter – “macoseconds”, or simply “makosecki”. Not to be confused with sushi!
We first used “macoseki” in one of our previous projects, it was related to real estate. In this area, the decision-making time is long, so it was important to optimize the campaign for this indicator. That time, the counter worked perfectly, and now we recommend installing it to all our clients.
Important: “macoseki” only counts active seconds spent on the site. The time without tapping the smartphone screen or without scrolling on the desktop is not counted. This is how we cut off bot visits and forgotten tabs in the browser.
We have different options for “macosecond” counters. For example:
30makosecvisit
Duration of active time within each individual visit.120makosecuser
Duration of active time within each user (summed up across all visits).30makosecuserrepeat
The duration of active time, if the condition is met: was already on the site once, and the first time was longer than 30 seconds (we can change 30 seconds in the script settings in GTM).
This is what the code for the basic “macoseca” counter looks like:
If at the first stage we only pressed on the macro-goal, now in addition to it we use the micro-goals of “makosec”. Now advertising campaigns gain micro-goals, learn from them, periodically achieve macro-goals – that is, we conduct a targeted search for those visitors who not only spent N seconds on the site, but also left a request at the end of their visit. This way, we optimize the campaign for both micro and macro goals at the same time.
We used “macosecs” in all tools: Search, Shopping campaign, Campaign Wizard, YAN. We completely rebuilt the Unified Performance Campaign (UPC) to micro goals.
Case in numbers
Time to sum up. Let's compare two stages of the project:
unsuccessful, with an old site and macro-conversion settings;
successful, with a new website and comprehensive settings for micro- and macro-goals.
As you can see, the click-through rate was high at the first stage, too – which means the ads were written and configured well. But the high bounce rate negated all efforts: there were very few leads and they were very expensive. With the new site, all key indicators became noticeably better. Visitors came to the new site, found what they were looking for, and left a request. Bingo!
It's funny that even the viewing depth has become higher – and this is despite the fact that the old site had 15 pages, and the new one has only 3 full pages. This is what it means to have a site with a well-thought-out user path and correctly placed calls to action.
Result: more than 20 applications for a range of printing services, a third of which turned into real orders.
The average bill for a large corporate order in B2B is about 100,000 rubles. In this context, a lead priced at 4,000 looks great. The printing house is basically focused on long-term cooperation with its clients, which means that each new lead will bring even more profit in the long term.
Lyrical conclusion
The case, in our opinion, is very illustrative. A vivid example of how a company with no experience in contextual advertising can waste its budget. This is where the myth that good old “word of mouth” is better than contextual advertising comes from: it doesn't cost money, but it brings in new clients.
Word of mouth alone won't bring in 20 new clients in a couple of months. But smart contextual advertising will.
That's all, thank you for your attention. We'll be happy to discuss the case in the comments.
If you need to increase your conversions, order our deep audit of contextual advertising for 0 rubles on makodigital.ru
How will this be useful?
We will find technical errors in campaign settings and segment them by danger level: minor, significant and critical.
Let's check the statistics and find the reason for the increase in the cost of circulation and the fall in profits.
Important! We will recommend positioning, content and development (conversion, usability, functionality) for the site.
We will develop a contextual advertising strategy with new growth points.
