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 Ads, 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 Google Ads.

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 click through rate (CTR) and booking conversion rates for each target audience. Separate RLSA (remarketing list for search ad) campaigns were created to re-engage with previous website visitors when they later search again on Google for more broader themes related to beauty. RLSA ad messages, keywords, and bidding strategies were adjusted to reflect the differences in brand experience and likelihood of booking for each audience type.

Campaign results

Combining location and treatment themes across keywords and ad messages allowed the campaigns to become extremely relevant to 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 (Google's measure of relevance), both of which helped to lower 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 click through rate (CTR) for similar keywords
• 24% increase in impression-weighted Quality Scores

Although the average cost per click (CPC) was similar to the previous campaigns, if brand themes were excluded, average CPC fell by 43%, with similar non-brand keywords achieving a significantly higher average position and Impression Share despite the lower average click costs. Separting out brand therefore provided clarity which was not possible when brand and non-brand were bundled together.

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 to reach more new customers and grow their client base, with tailored remarketing strategies for customers and non-customers allowing a more personalised and helpful searching experience for each user, leading to a stronger return on investment from Google Ads.

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