Strategic Changes Improve Restaurant’s Pay-Per-Click Campaign

ISSUE

Pushing the Envelope, Inc. (PTE) worked with a restaurant on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Google Ads campaign in 2020. The restaurant received a high number of clicks, but it did not lead to an increase in traffic throughout the website via Click-Through-Rate (CTR). In January 2021, PTE revisited this opportunity and presented a plan to improve the restaurant’s CTR at a lower budget and refined the search terms to increase the number of people taking an action on the website.

OBJECTIVES & STRATEGIES

Starting in February 2021, the following objectives were to be completed within one month, by the end of March 2021:

• Increase CTR above industry average, 4.68%, increasing the pages per session via Google Analytics
• Maintain an average cost-per-click (CPC) below $1, decreasing the amount spent on each click during the campaign.

PTE developed an effective pay-per-click (PPC) campaign via Google Ads by:

• Implementing responsive search ads to accommodate various headlines and descriptions to be used to appeal to different audiences
• Adjusting the keyword strategy to add negative keywords to narrow the target audience interacting on the ad to reduce the CPC on searches not related to the client’s business
• Including and updating various extensions to reflect the client’s latest specials throughout reported months
• Adding a maximum CPC to the campaign to ensure the client’s ads are bidding effectively and efficiently

RESULTS: ALL OBJECTIVES WERE MET AND EXCEEDED! Comparing February 19 to March 16 of 2020 to 2021:

• The CTR increased by 6.91% in 2021, to 9.20%, exceeding the objective by 4.52% compared to 2020.
• CPC in 2021 decreased by $0.07 to $0.55, exceeding the objective by $0.45 and reducing the expense by $615 compared to 2020.