ACS | Case Study | Breckenridge

Our client is a learned society based in the United States that supports scientific enquiry in the field of chemistry. Their publishing programme includes more than 90 specialist scholarly journals, publishing peer-reviewed original research for a specialist scientific and academic audience.

The Challenge

Targeting such a niche audience within such a large field raises significant obstacles with digital advertising efforts. Despite high volumes of traffic and significant spend, there was no insight into the quality of traffic or if any real return on investment was being made.

Our Approach

We conducted a comprehensive audit of the clients AdWords account, and uncovered the following issues:

• Poor Conversion Tracking: Only generic interactions were being tracked, with no focus on valuable customer actions.
• Tracking Limitations: Key areas of the website are served through a third party provider, rendering us unable to accurately track paid conversions within this area
• Irrelevant Audience: High traffic volumes but weak relevance to the core service.
• Inefficient Ad Spending: Extensive waste in ad spend due to irrelevant placements and broad targeting.

Without the right event tracking in place, it wasn't possible to attribute leads to paid advertising campaigns, or to engage in testing and refining those campaigns to improve the outcomes. For example, page views were being afforded the same importance as a form submission. This was the biggest challenge we identified, exacerbated by the multiple domains in play and different GA4 accounts linked to each.

The second challenge was with the targeting of campaigns. We found that duplicate and low value keywords were being targeted, and that display network audiences were set to observe rather than target; resulting in a global audience of all ages and education levels; not just scientists. This had the twofold effect that relevant audiences were not being reached within budget parameters, and that a significant proportion of the budget was being wasted. For example, of the top 10 most clicked placements, 8 were apps, including several games aimed at young children. These unwanted apps were responsible for 10,802 of the 16,387 clicks in one campaign alone, resulting in a combined total of 57,626 irrelevant clicks across the account in 2023.

The Solutions

We proposed and subsequently implemented the following:

• Refinement of Conversion Tracking: To counteract the blind-spot caused by untrackable areas of the website, we redesigned the conversion tracking from the ground up to focus on meaningful customer actions and assigned weighted values to each to help train Google’s algorithms in what to look for when setting bids.
• Streamlining Keywords and Audiences: We removed duplicate and low-value keywords and refined audience targeting to exclude irrelevant traffic.
• Overhaul of Display Network Strategy: We disabled non-performing display campaigns, immediately saving approximately $4,500 per month (over 10% of the account budget), with zero impact on high-priority conversions.
• Creation of insightful dashboards: Preserving the original data, we created dashboards that provide the client with a depth of insight they have never had access to before; greatly reducing the time it takes them to report internally whilst being able to offer data at both macro and granular levels.

The Results

The transformation yielded impressive results, demonstrating significant improvements in efficiency and effectiveness:

• Cost Efficiency: Reclaimed over $45,000 (18%) in yearly ad spend without sacrificing conversion numbers.
• Increased Engagement: Search campaign click-through rates increased by 35%.
• Higher Conversion Rates: A 30.15% increase in form submissions was achieved through optimised search campaigns.