Utilizing Paid Search to Drive Leads – A Customer Success Story | The Catalyst

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This is Adlucent’s Catalyst video series. I’m Brad Costella, senior director of strategy. Today, we’re going to talk through a challenge that we recently had the opportunity to solve with one of our partners, who’s a national pet services and retail brand. I’m joined today by Jenna Juliano, an account manager here in our client services team. Jenna, please tell me a little bit about yourself and the brand that you work on.

Hi everyone, I’m Jenna Juliano. I’ve been at Adlucent for two years and am an account manager II. I work on an enterprise-level pet retailer, on the business’s pet services and membership side, supporting their paid search lead gen efforts. We support services like pet grooming and training, as well as vet hospitals and pet vaccination clinics through text campaigns, Performance Max campaigns, and on display.

Thanks again for joining me today. I’m really excited to chat with you about this. So our client implemented a new booking funnel that combined a couple of possible service bookings into one funnel on the user side. How did that go? 

The retailer recently implemented a new booking funnel back in September of 2022 with the goal of streamlining the booking process for vet hospitals and vaccination.

The business set up this new funnel to help users more appropriately book appointments based on their pets needs. Immediate results of this funnel weren’t as positive as they had hoped, and they started to see a decline in vaccination leads driven by hospital campaigns. 

That’s a bummer. Obviously, anytime you’re trying to make an improvement like that based on data and understanding the consumer better, it’s disappointing not to actually see those results play out. So, given that challenge and seeing some of those numbers decline, what did our team decide to do to try and improve this? 

We brainstormed a few ideas. One of them was to create a new custom goal that pulled in both our vet hospital and vaccination conversion actions. And then, we set our better hospital performance max campaign to optimize for this new custom goal.

We know that vet and vaccination users share a similar customer journey. Still, the appointment they do end up booking ultimately depends on what their pet needs at that time and what’s currently offered in their area. It didn’t make sense to create this custom goal, pulling in both conversion actions to reach those additional qualified leads.

We also utilize similar audience signals within our Performance Max campaigns for vet hospital and vaccination bookings. One of those audience signals was for new pet owners. We know that new pet owners are a key audience to utilize for both vet and vaccination. Just given that when people first get their pets, they will need a lot of vaccinations as puppies, as well as those customers are looking to establish a primary care veterinarian for their pet.

So there are many similarities between the two, so it didn’t make sense to set up that custom conversion goal, apply it, and test that in our Performance Max campaign. 

Interesting. I love finding those similarities between, what ultimately could be a different action at the end, but similar buyer journeys leading up to that action. It’s a fun challenge trying to align similar buyer journeys but different actions to improve the data the algorithms operate from.

So, Pmax has typically been looked at as the new commerce solution from Google, but why did you see that they would be a good fit here on more of a lead gen basis? 

Yeah, absolutely. Aside from the fact that Pmax was where we saw the largest decline in vaccination leads, we also know that Performance Max captures additional signals and is aware of the customer’s path to purchase journey.

So we utilized those features to our advantage for Lead Gen. Specifically, with Performance Max, we used a combination of text, image, and video assets to serve the customer the most appropriate ad at that given time, and in addition to those features, we’re also able to apply this custom conversion goal to our Performance Max campaigns to drive those additional leads.

Having all of those features in combination made performance max a good fit to give this a test. And I’ll take a minute here so Jenna doesn’t have to brag about herself and the team and really call out that, by improving those data signals, going into the algorithm that everything was operating and optimizing towards, we were able to improve vaccinations by 85% within those campaigns.

And at the same time, vet hospital bookings also increased by 7%, which is pretty fantastic. And all of that on a 28% lower cost per acquisition. So it wasn’t even that the Pmax campaigns were spending significantly more to get these new leads. It was optimizing towards a better conversion with better data and better signals going in.

After achieving such great results, what next steps did the team take in their strategy? 

Ultimately this test reiterates the need to adapt to changes within our client’s businesses and really develop strategies that align with their business goals.

Our client’s needs are constantly changing. Being able to specifically set up a goal that is directly aligned with their new booking funnel really allowed us to drive those incremental leads for a secondary line of business without hurting our main KPI. So we’ve continued to see incremental leads for vaccination being driven through that campaign, and we’re definitely really pleased with that.

The main takeaway here is don’t be afraid to test new things and don’t be afraid to adapt and transform your strategy based on what meets your client’s needs. 

“The main takeaway here is don’t be afraid to test new things and don’t be afraid to adapt and transform your strategy based on what meets your client’s needs.”

Jenna Juliano

Love hearing that. This fits into the ethos here at Adlucent so well. Always learning, always testing. Thanks again, Jenna, for your time. And that’s all for today, folks.

Brad Costella

Brad is a Senior Director of Strategy at Adlucent. He is a strategic, data-driven, solutions-focused marketing leader with 10+ years of experience in omni-channel digital marketing and customer acquisition. He has a passion for turning insights into actionable strategies that improve real world outcomes for advertisers and customers. He believes that success comes from finding and striking the sweet spot where customer's needs intersect with a brand's value and goals.