The London School Of English
Challenge
With over 100 years of experience in teaching general, business, academic, and professional English courses in London and online, The London School of English is the UK’s most trusted language learning school. By using Google Ads, The London School of English wants to promote its language courses on a global scale. Goals Setup Google Analytics correctly. Correct GA attribution tracking and solve cross-domain tracking problem. Increase online inquiries and online sales from German-speaking countries Manage and optimize English and non-English Google Ads campaigns to increase ROAS and online conversions.
Solution
Approach Detailed Google Analytics audit. Ensured goals and e-commerce hits were tracked properly in Google Analytics. Solved double hit problem and wrong data hits on important checkout pages. Extended the referral exclusion list. Created individual Google Ads campaigns for each country and for each language. Regular bid optimization. Set up remarketing campaigns. Improved data collection on Google Analytics. Increased number of online transactions and form enquiries. Highly optimized and targeted campaigns per country. Before we could dive right into the optimization of the Google Ads campaigns and running the ads, we first had to make sure that the Google Analytics tracking was set up properly. We’ve made a quick analytics audit and discovered several tracking issues. We started to add missing event tracking label parameters, fixed the event tracking issues for live-chat, phone clicks, and contact forms, and created missing goal conversions for language-specific forms. We turned on Bot Filtering to receive clean data inside Google Analytics, we added several third party websites to the referral exclusion list to get true traffic attribution, and the double hits that were occurring on important checkout pages were fixed. The next step was to focus on the Google Ads campaigns. The London School of English had global campaigns running, meaning: one campaign was targeting 20+ countries at the same time. What we did was setting up individual campaigns, each focusing on a single country. To make it more specific, we’ve divided the country targeting into different regions and cities. By analyzing the past Google Analytics geo-location data, we pulled out the regions and cities where leads and transactions took place previously and used these ones for the campaign targeting. For the majority of the countries, we also set up two campaigns; an English campaign, and a campaign in the country’s native language. Like this, we were able to create language-specific ad texts and extensions. With each campaign consisting of only one ad copy, we’ve extended all ad groups with 3 relating and diverse ad texts, and prepared relevant extensions like sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call extensions, and location extensions in both English and other languages. The ad groups in the campaigns were divided into related keyword groups, based on the courses offered, brand name, and competitors. According to country, different courses were promoted, different keyword variations based on the competition were used, and different budgets were allocated. At all times we kept a close eye on the sales targets for each country and optimized accordingly. As the walk-in traffic to their London and Canterbury school locations are highly targeted leads, we have optimized the UK campaign by radius targeting and local bid optimization. Additionally, we created locally relevant ad groups with Canterbury and London related keyword variations. Over time we started to collect true data via Google Analytics, and we were able to better track soft and hard KPIs. With this knowledge, we started to optimize the Google Ads campaigns continuously; we regularly optimized bids by location, audience, and devices, we’ve optimized keywords and extended the negative keywords frequently, did performance optimization by expanding keywords and ad groups, and removed or paused low performing ad groups. Eventually, we started to run a remarketing campaign targeting key markets and low priority countries with different budget allocations.
Results
Since the start of the Google Analytics audit and running the Google Ads campaigns from July 2019 on, we’ve not only made sure that Google Analytics brought in only clean and accurate website data, but also lifted the Google Ads account from The London School of English to a whole new level. Their Google Ads account went from 10 active global search campaigns to 38 highly targeted campaigns in 9 different languages. Due to the separation of the Google Ads campaigns into different countries, we retrieved country-specific information. This information was crucial to have, as it told us exactly which countries generally are interested in what courses, and which countries convert faster after seeing the ads. Thanks to the new tracking, we were also able to see how people were reaching out to The London School of English after seeing the ads; whether via phone calls, live chat, form enquiry, transactions, or online course e-commerce. By combining both country-specific information and preferred conversion method, we had a powerful optimization formula to work with. By solving the E-commerce tracking problem, we were able to see the right transaction and revenue data, which was the basis for our further optimization planning. Compared to the previous period we saw a 25% uplift in the overall sales and revenue numbers. After taking over the Google Ads account and applying our account restructuring and optimizations, we see a 1300% increase in conversions from search campaigns and gained an additional increase in conversions of 450% with the display remarketing campaigns. Conversion rates improved respectively and besides that, we’ve managed to drop the cost per conversion for the search campaigns by 30%, and even by 80% for the display campaigns.
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