American Financial Services

“The value in doing business with Engine Ready was made clear when we saw results immediately after installing Conversion Analyst tracking software…”

Robert Kurhajian – Co-Founder

American Financial Services

The Company

American Financial Services is a debt settlement company that represents its clients in settlement negotiation with creditors.

The 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.

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.

sing 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.

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 creative’s 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
• 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 Result

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!”