Case Study - Sofa.com

The main objective of our PPC work for Sofa.com was to generate visitors to their site that could then be converted into customers. The problem with any market such as sofas is that the generic terms such as ‘sofas’ are very competitive as these keywords produce large volumes of traffic. To create a well structured account for Sofa.com we had to not only bid on these difficult keywords, getting value in tough keyword auctions, but also find other areas that could generate traffic and amass an account full of long tail keywords.

By splitting the account into separate ‘Generic’ and ‘Long Tail’ campaigns we could then see exactly how each area was performing. Although the generic phrases did still produce a large percentage of the traffic, we were able to balance that against the ‘tail’ phrases, often at a lower cost per click. We also ensured that there was consistency throughout the search chain so that quality scores remained high. Obviously when your company is called sofa.com then Google will quickly establish relevance for the generic terms but we ensured that the adverts tied in well with the ‘tail’ keywords too so that the quality score was rarely less than Great for any area. The result of this work and the constant review process of bids and advert split-testing means that even at a time of year when traffic levels have fallen (as shown in this graph of impressions below) we have managed to maintain and often better the total number of clicks that we were receiving in busier periods.

Impressions – Traffic fell through the year, with the last month being particularly quiet.

Clicks – Although prone to fluctuation, the clicks have remained high in periods of low impressions. The progress of the account can perhaps best be seen in the clickthrough rate (shown below). The on-going process of split-testing ensured that the clickthrough rate has improved dramatically, especially in the last month when impressions have dropped. Without this improvement, overall clicks would have dropped considerably, leaving sofa.com with a fraction of the PPC visitors. So we have managed to counteract the lull and, when we come to busier times, the hard work on CTR should see significantly higher clicks than before.

CTR – Improved through the year by constant split-testing.