Local business triples pre-registrations with Google Ads

"I have never seen the 24% conversion rate - have you?"

- Eric VanZwieten, Marketing Strategist, Zasady

overview

This chain of local dental assisting schools teaches young women how to become a dental assistant in a 10 week program at four locations in Ohio.
The owners wanted to significantly increase the discovery calls and pre-registration leads. They hired my marketing partner Zasady. Zasady had developed a comprehensive marketing plan that included, Google Ads. That's how I was brought in.

challenges

We knew that targeting and showing search ads to the right people would be the biggest challenge. A lot of dental keywords are used for other related topics in the dental fields. There are also many different types of dental assisting educations (dental schools, dental colleges, dental programs in schools and colleges).

I was to figure out how to dial in the search traffic to target young women in their four locations that were searching for a short dental assisting program. This 10-weeks program teaches the basics of dental assisging so young women that are stuck in life can start a good career in less than 3 moths even if they don't have a college degree.

Strategies

In a tricky situation where the keywords alone can't isolate the user intention, I knew i had to use Google's smart bidding. Google's smart bidding uses everything it knows about the user to determine their buying intention, and show the right ads to the right people.

For eample, if a person searching for our service had a recent history of visiting sites with similar services, smart bidding would raise the bid so this user would see the ad on top of the search results.

Before enabling smart bidding, I had to prepare the account.

Firstly, I had launched four campaigns - one per location - with several ad variants and the best initial keywords, and let it run for 4 weeks. This helped me fine-tune keywords and ads while collecting enough visitor data for Smart bidding to be effective.

From the second month on, smart bidding was enabled on all campaigns.

results

A few weeks after smart bidding had been enabled, conversion rates shot up and stayed up.

thoughts

It took some time to get Google Ads going, but has paid off handsomely. The system is robust enough for handle the doubling of spend without dropping conversion rates below 20%.
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Google smart bidding can be extremely effective in some situations.