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American Financial Services
Case Study :
An American Success Story
89% Increase in Sales Using Engine Ready
AdPilot
http://www.americanfinancial.com
Industry :
Consumer Credit Services
Debt settlement firms have developed a practical
approach to help financially struggling individuals pay their debts with
affordable monthly payments. Generally, the firms negotiate to reduce
clients’ debts and put clients on a monthly payment schedule they can
afford.
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The Company: American Financial Services is a debt settlement
company that represents its clients in settlement negotiation with creditors. |
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They target individuals looking to reduce personal debt in amounts of $10,000
and above. Participating in one of the fastest growing industries and providing
excellent service to thousands of individuals struggling with debt, American
Financial Services has become one of the largest debt settlement companies in
the United States.
The Challenge:
American Financial Services (AFS) recognized early the
importance of a strong Internet presence and driving qualified leads to its
site. After planning and implementing a solid infrastructure to handle growth,
AFS needed to find the most cost effective means to robust and sustainable
lead generation. Prior, their web site was just a presence to display
information about their company and explain their debt settlement program. And
their only significant source of prospects came from a lead broker; their cost
per lead was very expensive with a generally low conversion ratio for their
marketplace.
| American Financial Services was first introduced to Engine Ready when AFS
needed a solid analytics package to help develop and track a list of targeted
keywords in several pay-per-click search engines such as Yahoo Search
Marketing, FindWhat and Google AdWords.
Using Engine
Ready’s Conversion Analyst tracking software, American Financial Services
was able to identify exactly which keywords from which search engines were
generating their leads. |
"The value in doing business with Engine Ready was made clear when
we saw results immediately after installing Conversion Analyst tracking
software. Within just 180 days the project was a success!“
Robert
Kurhajian,
Co-founder of
American Financial Services
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This information immediately helped them significantly
decrease their marketing expenses by reducing the bids on the keywords that
were not converting into leads.
In its quest to continue increasing market share,
AFS began to realize that the highly competitive nature of the most popular
keywords was creating a considerable marketing challenge. In order to bring a
much higher volume of leads into its call center at its target cost/lead, it
was becoming clear that AFS was going to need Engine Ready’s search
marketing expertise.
AFS
approached Engine Ready to re-configure and take over complete management of
their pay-per-click accounts. AFS was particularly interested in Engine Ready
because of their proven track record in not only meeting client financial
targets, but also their landing page optimization and active click fraud
monitoring capabilities. These 2 facets were seen as absolute necessities to
ensure the highest level of campaign return in the face of increasing click
costs.
The Solution:
Engine Ready’s first step was to fully analyze
AFS’s services, competitors, industry and demographic makeup of its clients.
Next, a keyword phrase development strategy was implemented to ensure that all
possible phrases describing AFS’s services were inventoried.
A complete analysis of the existing setup of the
AFS accounts revealed opportunities for re-structuring using more granular
groups and campaigns. The revised setup also allowed Engine Ready to more
easily test various ad creatives for optimal effectiveness in lead generation.
Analyzing the reports in Conversion Analyst
ultimately allowed Engine Ready to locate web pages with abnormally high
bounce rates, study the most common path through the site, and target the most
successful keywords, search engines and online marketing campaigns.
Additionally, after 8 weeks of account
optimization and analyzing bounce rate reports, Engine Ready assisted AFS in
the design of test landing pages. These test pages offered:
-
A slightly more relaxed design that still
followed with the same look and feel as the remainder of the AFS site;
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Copy modifications to place a greater emphasis on benefits;
- A
change to the general flow of the page to guide the visitor more naturally to
the call-to-action
The Results:
Soon after Engine Ready implemented its new
keyword strategy and re-structured AFS’s groups and campaigns, AFS began to
experience increases in both qualified visitors and conversions to leads. The
testing of new landing pages led to significant decreases in the visitor
bounce rate, furthering the increase in conversions to leads.
Despite the consistent month-to-month increase in
keyword costs, Engine Ready, through its varied strategies, was able to keep
the cost/lead at the target. Due to the continued success of the campaigns,
AFS has increased their monthly budget by over 400% and has experienced
considerable growth in their business.
The increased budget has allowed for further
profitable expansion of their campaigns into many targeted 2nd tier
search engines. AFS has been able to attract the highest return on their
advertising dollar helping fuel solid profitable growth for the organization.
With Engine Ready, American Financial Services
increased sales 89% and grew their in-house lead generation by 98%. American Financial Services maintained 20% or higher lead to sales
conversion and lowered the average cost per lead from $49.38 to $21.90, which
attributed to a 39% increase in overall profits. "The value in doing
business with Engine Ready was made clear when we saw results immediately
after installing Conversion Analyst tracking software," commented Robert
Kurhajian, co-founder of American Financial Services. "Within just 180
days the project was a success!"
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