Finance Case Study:

Client

Compare and Cover (www.CompareAndCover.co.uk) is one of the UK's leading financial comparison sites, specializing in loans, mortgages, and insurance. The company helps people save money by allowing them to search, compare, and apply for lower rates and prices among these products and services.

Overview

With over 5,000 different mortgage products in the UK, searching for the best mortgage deals can be a time consuming and frustrating task. This is also true for loans and insurance products. Compare and Cover approached Direct Agents about developing a paid search campaign to improve their presence in search and increase customer acquisitions. With the slowing of the economy, especially in the financial sector, Compare and Cover recognized that advertising, especially in paid search where user acquisition is most cost effective, would be essential for their continued success.

Challenges

In a climate of tightening margins due to the mortgage and broader financial crisis, Compare and Cover needed to be more selective when acquiring new customers, and could only rely on the highest ROI initiatives. As a result, our goal was to increase the number of conversions in this campaign, while dramatically increasing quality. Active campaigns were targeted to the more profitable businesses.

Another challenge Direct Agents faced was the competitiveness of the keywords surrounding mortgages and loans in the paid search arena. With hundreds upon hundreds of advertisers running paid search campaigns on primary keywords such as “mortgage quote,” prices for these keywords are typically extremely expensive, and therefore, not ROI-friendly. Direct Agents would need to perform extensive keyword research to locate new keywords that would effectively generate the higher quality conversions Compare and Cover required.

Strategy

In order to efficiently manage all consumer acquisitions through search, Direct Agents generated a fully functional micro-site that diverted traffic back to Compare and Cover. Working with Compare and Cover, Direct Agents was able to optimize the micro-site to maximize lead quality. In addition, targeted ads, as well as a comprehensive keyword strategy were used in order to increase both traffic and quality.

Micro-site Creation

We found that the current landing pages did not best serve the Google and Yahoo quality scores of the campaign. By creating a micro-site and using it to divert traffic back to Compare and Cover, we were able to optimize the conversions for the specific products that the company wanted to promote as well as the quality indexes for the search engines where the campaign was running. The micro-site we created was further optimized by conducting multivariate testing throughout all levels to ensure that only the factors that drove increased performance were instituted.

Keyword Strategy

Keywords were initially chosen to broaden the overall reach of Compare and Cover. We used our keyword base as a benchmark to optimize the ad-spend of the company. However, given the financial situation, Compare and Cover had to cut the advertising on certain products, as they were less profitable than others. Direct Agents then performed an analysis of the keywords and terms that converted for Compare and Cover's low ROI products, and promptly generated negative matching options for these keywords. In order to discover new potential high-converting keywords, Direct Agents developed a keyword expansion strategy, while keywords that were already successful were given additional focus and resources. The campaign was then tracked and optimized on at the keyword level to fully maximize ROI.

Ad-Copy Strategy

In order to further optimize the quality of the campaign, targeted ad copy was created to filter out any unwanted traffic, while compelling the potential customers that Compare and Cover wanted to click through and drive conversions.

Results

Compare and Cover asked Direct Agents to increase the quality of the acquisitions in search. Not only did we achieve this, but we also decreased the effective Cost per Acquisition of the campaign by 40%, further improving Compare and Cover's ROI in a time when it is needed most. On average, Direct Agents generated nearly 1800 new quality mortgage inquiries, as well as over 2500 new quality loan inquiries per month during a slowing financial period.