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360° Paid Search Marketing

Summary

Our digital marketing team conducted an in-depth analysis of touchpoints in the paid search experience for one of the U.S.’ largest independent HVAC and plumbing services company. The analysis included click to call, appointment booking, and revenue, which provided deep insight and substantial ROI improvement for the client.

Our Role

  • Paid Search Research
  • Paid Search Strategy
  • Conversion Tracking
  • Time of Day/Day of Week Analysis
  • Return-On-Investment Analysis

Summary

Our digital marketing team conducted an in-depth analysis of touchpoints in the paid search experience for one of the U.S.’ largest independent HVAC and plumbing services company. The analysis included click to call, appointment booking, and revenue, which provided deep insight and substantial ROI improvement for the client.

Our Role

  • Paid Search Research
  • Paid Search Strategy
  • Conversion Tracking
  • Time of Day/Day of Week Analysis
  • Return-On-Investment Analysis

The Challenge

ARS®/Rescue Rooter® is one of the U.S.’ largest independent home services companies, offering heating, air conditioning, indoor air quality, plumbing, drain cleaning, and sewer line services from company-owned locations across the country. Since March of 2009, we’ve served as the digital marketing agency for dozens of their location-based lines of business throughout the country.

When it comes to paid search, it’s fairly standard for digital agencies to declare their job as complete once the click has been delivered to the client. However, our goals are not simply to generate clicks and calls for ARS®/Rescue Rooter®, but to understand and involve ourselves in the broader process of generating ROI for the client.

The Analysis | A 360° Paid Search Marketing Effort

The Analysis

In the case of our paid search marketing for ARS®/Rescue Rooter®, our team identified the following sales funnel. We then performed detailed analyses not just on costs and conversions (i.e. calls), but also the efficiency of CSRs with respect to appointment booking and average transaction sizes (based on post hoc revenue reporting).

Our analyses highlight the extreme differences in performance by day and time of day for a variety of metrics and how those metrics compound to affect ROI. For the purposes of this case study, we present two different ARS®/Rescue Rooter® markets but conceal the names of those markets to preserve confidentiality. The patterns found in one market differ substantially from the patterns found in the other, further highlighting the need to perform individual deep market analyses.

The Insights

Our team amassed a considerable number of actionable insights based on our analyses. The insights allowed us to provide guidance to the client on potential ways to optimize their management of budget and staffing.

Below, we provide a sample of those insights and their implications. However, there were dozens of insights with corresponding implications. Due to confidentiality, we refer to the two ARS®/Rescue Rooter® markets as Market A and Market B.

 

The Insights | A 360° Paid Search Marketing Effort

Insight 1

Market A’s ROI Is Higher on the Weekends

In Market A, ROI on click cost incurred on weekends is higher. This is due to the compounding effects on weekends of lower weekend Cost Per Click, more Calls Per Click, and better CSR Booking Rate. And, while weekend Average Transaction Size is actually lower, this factor is outweighed by the compounding positive effects of other factors.

 

Insight 2

Market A’s ROI Is Highest Between 7pm and 9pm

In Market A, while cost per click is generally (i.e. on Mon-Weds and Thurs-Sat) lower in the late afternoon and evenings, ROI from 7pm to 9pm is generally the highest. However, the reason for this higher ROI differs depending upon the day. For example:

  • The higher ROI between 8pm and 9pm on Mondays and between 7pm and 9pm on Tuesdays is primarily attributable to a combination of lower Cost Per Click and higher Average Transaction Size.
  • The higher ROI between 7pm and 9pm on Wednesdays is primarily attributable to a combination of lower Cost Per Click and better Booking Rate.
  • The higher ROI between 7pm and 9pm on Friday and Saturday is primarily attributable to a combination of lower Cost Per Click and more Calls Per Click.

 

Insight 3

Market B’s ROI is Higher on Saturday

The first insight that was generated for Market A (“Market A’s ROI Is Higher on the Weekends”) is not true for Market B. While Sunday is the highest ROI day for Market A and Saturday is the second highest ROI day for Market A, this is not the case for Market B. Market B’s highest ROI day is Saturday, with Sunday being Market B’s second to lowest ROI day.

 

Insight 4

Technician Scheduling Implications

The above insights had not only bidding, ad scheduling, and ad copy implications for our paid search campaigns, but also potential call center scheduling and technician scheduling implications. For example, the client originally had concerns over lifestyle implications for technicians working on weekends. However, the high weekend ROI for Market A and higher Saturday ROI for Market B led our team to recommend compensation changes as a solution based on increased profitability.

The client can revisit call center staffing based upon examination of whether Booking Rate variation was inherently due to Day of Week and Time of Day. Or, whether Day of Week and Time of Day were simply a proxy for certain CSRs being on duty. Was Market A’s high Booking Rate on Wednesdays during the 8pm to 9pm window due to the date and time, or was it due to the fact that someone exceptionally good at booking appointments was taking calls in the call center at that time? If certain date and time windows are inherently better for appointment booking, the client can shift the CSRs that are better at booking appointments to other date and time windows. A method of exploring this would be to analyze the overall performance of technicians that are on duty during that date and time window relative to other technicians.

Important Metric Notes

When referring to the data, it’s important to note that all metrics shown are reported as relative to the average. For example, a Cost Per Click of -3.3% for Market A on a Thursday means that the cost of a click in Market A is 3.3% lower on a Thursday than the average cost of a click in Market A across all days. Another example would be that Booking Rate of +2.7% for Market B on a Wednesday means that the booking rate in Market B is 2.7% better than the average booking rate for Market B across all days.

The matrices for each metric show Day of Week in the column labels and Time of Day in the row labels. The reason that the Time of Day row labels only show data from 7am to 9pm is because the limited amount of data outside of that time range was so limited (e.g. very few clicks and very few calls) that outliers skewed the visual conditional formatting of the analysis. For example, if you look at the Average Transactions Size matrix for Market A, imagine, hypothetically, that there had indeed been only three calls at 3am in total across all Wednesdays. Now imagine that one of those calls was booked and turned into a transaction worth $50K. That would cause the conditional formatting to label that cell as bright green because it would be the best day and time across all days and time for the size of an average transaction. And all other cells in the Average Transaction Size matrix would shift their formatting to the white to red end of the spectrum making visual inspection of differentiation difficult. That fact, combined with the fact that we want to act on data that is likely statistically significant drove us to decide to focus on a Time of Day range that contained adequate volumes across all metrics in the analyses.

All references to Days of Week and Times of Day are based upon the date/time of the click. That is to say, for example, when you look at the ROI metrics for both Market A for Wednesday at 9am, that cell is calculated based off of: the cost incurred by all clicks that occurred in the 9am to 9:59am window on Wednesdays, AND the revenue ultimately collected for calls that are associated with those clicks. Note that a small amount of error is associated between the alignment of click and call times, however, our research shows that amount of error is minimal.

The Analysis | A 360° Paid Search Marketing Effort

The Results

Over the years of working with ARS®/Rescue Rooter®, our team has demonstrated an ability to leverage our business and analytics capabilities to continuously improve performance and provide guidance to the client. In this case, our analyses drove insight and opportunity on two fronts. First, we provided operational insight and optimization opportunities to the client in the management of their call center and allocation of sales and technician resources. And second, we were able to strategically redistribute campaign funds to drive ROI up 32.9%.

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