Glenigan is an information services company for the construction industry who supply detailed information about construction projects in the UK via a subscription service. Clients include construction firms, mid-sized and large contractors, and the manufacturers/suppliers of building materials and services. Glenigan has the most accurate and comprehensive database of construction sales leads in the UK, and their information helps their subscribers win contracts and gain insight into the construction market. 

Challenge

Glenigan had been running paid search campaigns with some success, but wanted to increase their number of qualified leads year on year. They also wanted to drive greater efficiency from paid media channels so that they could achieve a lower CPA and get the most from their marketing budgets. Paid search formed an important part of Glenigan’s digital channel mix, so it was vital to the client that the channel was reaching the right audience, high quality leads were being generated for the sales team, and efforts weren’t being wasted on consumer traffic.   

With this brief, we set about creating a plan which would help Glenigan connect with their target audience and improve the performance of their paid search campaigns.  

Solution 

Our first move was to make sure that paid search activity was connecting with quality users. We knew that we needed to reach a B2B audience, and (where possible) limit exposure to consumer traffic. 

We took measures to analyse campaign performance by both time of day and day of week, and ensure that the account’s budgets were aligned with performance. Running campaigns during trading hours only greatly improved spend efficiency, and within these hours we were able to find additional pockets of efficiency in which we could adjust our bidding accordingly. 

To help further refine our paid search targeting, the team also took advantage of audience demographic information so that we could identify areas of wasted spend, and areas of opportunity. We examined campaign performance by factors such as age, gender, and user household income to make sure that we limited ad delivery to those not interested in Glenigan’s proposition. Conversely, we were then able to maximise our efforts on audience demographics who responded well to our ads, and were likely to result in a qualified lead.

In addition to demographic audience analysis, we then started to run several in-market audiences on groups we believed to be similar to Glenigan’s target customers. By observing the behaviour of relevant groups – such as users in the market for general contracting services – we were able to set bids based on their performance.

Taking it a step further, we were also able to help the client install website tracking so that we could keep track of users who were already Glenigan subscribers. With this information we excluded current customers from our prospecting campaigns to reduce wasted spend on users who were simply looking to log in to the website’s subscriber area. We also started to bid more aggressively on returning site visitors who were yet to convert, as our analysis showed that they were much more likely to convert compared with cold leads.    

Results

The result of our audience refinement work were significant improvements in account performance and overall lead volume. From paid search we generated a 17.5% increase in qualified leads, comparing the first half of 2019 with the first half of 2018. 

Over the same period, we were also able to decrease Glenigan’s cost per lead by 20%. Furthermore, the client saw these improvements without increasing their marketing budget between the two periods, meaning that overall efficiency was greatly improved.

Ian Bellamy, Head of Marketing at Glenigan, said: “Strange has helped us to spend our paid search budget much more efficiently and effectively. We’ve managed to spend less and achieve more through improvements in both the volume and quality of leads. The team has made a real positive impact, not only are they focused on delivering improved business results, they’re also a great team to work with and a valuable extension to our internal team. Highly recommend.”

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