Strategy and approach

Based on the assignment received from MKB Euroleasing, the task of the 7digits PPC team was to double the incoming leads – in no more than 90 days, solely by optimizing the AdWords account.

Financial marketing is a challenging area, the market is saturated, the services can be considered boxed, and comparison is easy.

With a considerable amount of work, we finally achieved a 208% increase, but beyond expertise, the client’s wisdom and patience were also necessary.

Upon closer inspection of the AdWords (now Google Ads) account, it was evident that the previous manager knew their job well.

However, no changes had been made to the account for more than half a year (which is quite rare in the field of financial marketing), as they needed to focus elsewhere due to other reasons – leaving the Euroleasing account ownerless.

After the routine examination of the AdWords account, it turned out that the ad extensions, the ads, and the targetings of the display campaigns were all in order.

So at first glance, there was no point where a change promised multiplication. The only interesting, “unusual” setting was that the traffic was diverted to four pages instead of one.

What are the chances of achieving significant results in the field of financial marketing with an AdWords account that is fundamentally professionally set up?

Through the client’s eyes

It was a pleasure to experience the wide range of skills and enthusiastic working style of the team.

– János Pintye, Head of Digital

Execution

Since the four pages were landings with different contents, it raised the question: what counts as a lead from Euroleasing’s perspective? (See how much strategy matters even in the field of financial marketing?) It turned out that leads that generate revenue for Euroleasing come only through two of the four landing pages.

Work continued with an extremely detailed keyword research, but surprisingly, this did not lead to results: the client was already advertising for 95% of the potential keywords.

However, a closer look at the spending revealed that a third of the advertising costs of the previously conducted financial marketing campaign was directed to the page that converted poorly. Thus, solely reallocating the budget offered an opportunity for approximately a 30-40% improvement – but this was still not enough to achieve the goal.

A retrospective analysis

We had to figure out, among the myriad search terms the client was advertising for, which ones were actually converting well, and which ones were not? We’re talking about search terms here, not keywords! Filtering these in Analytics for the past year resulted in a table with more than 26,000 rows.

We were looking for unusual expressions in the field of financial marketing that are common in searches, and then filtered to see if these expressions converted. If yes, we kept them; if not, we moved them to the negative keywords. For example, it turned out that many people search for the keyword “calculator”.

We resorted to a data mining tool for the so-called N-grams: we looked for those 2-grams that appeared at least three times in the conversions. We found 19 expressions that included “leasing calculator” and 16 that included “car loan calculator”.

Data-Driven Approach

From the above expressions, both the ad group settings and the negative keywords were clarified – it was time to fine-tune the heart of financial marketing, the advertising account. We followed the Broad Match Modified – Exact breakdown, and the better performing cities received a small bid modifier.

We also elevated brand expressions into a separate campaign because the first two organic hits for the term “euroleasing” were not the most illustrious, and this landing didn’t convert well anyway. We ended up with slightly more campaigns than before, but we had a better overview of the structure and were able to write more targeted advertisements.

Regarding remarketing, we had high hopes, but Google eventually banned these advertisements because promoting many financial marketing products, including loan products, goes against its guidelines.

Although it could have been solved with another platform – for example, Facebook – we did not involve a new channel because, on the one hand, our 90-day deadline expired, and, on the other hand, we managed to reach 208% of the original leads even without it. (2022 update: Facebook now also restricts most expressions used in financial marketing!)