We manage an adwords campaign for the Ian Hendrick band, a specialist wedding band based in Cork. I was really interested to see how a PPC campaign would benefit Ian because he has enjoyed a seriously strong organic ranking for a number of years, appearing on the first pages
of Google for many really great keywords like “wedding bands Cork” etc.

Ian wanted to try adwords to target the areas that he didn’t have a strong organic ranking for, like the rest of the counties in Munster as well as some counties in Lower Leinster. Because of the sheer volume of enquiries that he receives on a daily basis it’s pretty tedious to go through all of the conversions and see which leads became clients, so Ian Judged the campaigns success on his yearly bookings target, in other words the number of gigs he wanted to book in a given year. In 2014 he had reached his target by August, we started his adwords campaign in late October of the same year.

The adwords campaign was setup as follows

1. Search marketing
2. Display re-marketing
3. Video re-marketing

We also created custom landing pages using unbounce, so that we could A/B test them and optimize the conversion rate. The call to action on the landing pages was “check availability” and the user is prompted to fill in their name, phone, email, wedding date and venue.

The search marketing campaign ensured that we showed up on google for relevant keywords like “wedding bands Limerick” “wedding band Kilkenny etc” and when searchers clicked on our ads we landed them on our custom created landing pages which we were split testing

If the user didn’t fill out the lead/enquiry form they were re-marketed to through the adwords display network, so for instance if they visited websites like RTE.ie and Breakingnews.ie they saw a display ad for the Ian Hendrick band.

The user was also re-marketed to using YouTube, if they went to watch a video on YouTube a video of Ian Hendrick performing played before their chosen video, they had the option to skip the video after 5 seconds and Ian only paid for a view if they watched 30 seconds or more.

In layman’s terms this is how it worked: when someone searched for a wedding band they found Ian on the first page of Google, when they visited other websites they were shown a graphic reminding them of how cool Ian looks when he is performing and when they watched a video on YouTube, a video of Ian rocking out reminded them that they needed to book the Ian Hendrick Band ASAP before their Wedding date was gone.

What were the results of the PPC campaign I hear you ask? By the end of March 2015 he had achieved the same number of bookings as he had by August 2014. So in 3 months of 2015 he achieved the same number of bookings as in 8 months in 2014. Boom!