The beauty
salon franchise

An increase in the percentage of clients booking treatments online over the previous year made it clear for an expanding Australian beauty salon franchise that having a successful online strategy was essential for their future. They had previously tried Google AdWords, but struggled to generate a profitable return on investment, so contacted Calculate Marketing for a fresh perspective. The key objectives were to reach new customers, increase online booking volume, and increase overall profitability from PPC marketing.

Summary

• 202% increase in online bookings after 12 months
• 656% increase in online bookings after 24 months
• 1,027% increase in online bookings after 36 months

How I helped

Over 100 different treatment themes and over 100 relevant target locations meant that a tailored long-tail strategy with 1,000s of tailored ad messages could help the beauty salon franchise stand out from the competition on Google:

• 4,253 ad groups
• 66,431 keywords
• 33,759 ad messages
• 183 landing pages

Price and non-price ad messages, sitelink extensions, and callout extensions were tested to help maximise CTR and booking conversion rates for each target audience. Separate RLSA (remarketing list for search ad) campaigns were created for previous converters and non-converters, with RLSA ad messages, keywords, and bidding strategies adjusted to reflect the inherent differences in brand experience and likelihood of booking for each audience type.

Campaign results

Combining location and treatment themes across keyword and ad messages allowed the campaigns to become extremely relevant to a huge variation in search phrases. Clicks and impressions were spread over 2,000 unique keywords and ad messages each month, allowing the long-tail strategy to deliver higher click through rates (CTR) and higher Quality Scores, lowering the average cost per click (CPC):

• Average of 2,120 unique keywords clicked per month
• Average of 2,347 unique ad messages clicked per month
• 137% increase in CTR for similar keywords
• 24% increase in weighted Quality Scores

Although the average CPC was similar to previous campaigns, if brand themes are excluded, average CPC fell by 43%, with similar non-brand keywords achieving a significantly higher average position and Impression Share despite the lower average CPC.

Client results

A compressive long-tail strategy proved to be incredibly effective for the beauty salon franchise, leading to a significant increase in online bookings over a 3 year period:

• 202% increase in online bookings after 12 months
• 656% increase in online bookings after 24 months
• 1027% increase in online bookings after 36 months

The increased focus on non-brand search themes allowed the salon focus on reaching new customers, with tailored RLSA strategies for previous customers and non-customers allowing a more personalised and helpful searching experience depending for each user, leading to a strong return on investment from PPC marketing.

The same tailored logic can apply to your business – if you want more sales and a lower cost per enquiry from Google PPC marketing, please get in touch for more information.