Case Study:

“The results that SureFire were able to generate for us as part of the True Market Challenge exceeded our expectations. They have become integral to the ongoing success of our online marketing efforts”

TODD HUNTER
General Manager Marketing – Turners Auctions

Type of Campaign

PPC Campaign

Synopsis

Turners Auctions Ltd (www.turners.co.nz) is the largest auction house in New Zealand with 16 branches nationwide and an annual turnover exceeding NZ $400 million, employing over 350 staff and auctioning approximately 150,000 vehicles annually.

Objectives

Despite Turners being the biggest seller of used cars in NZ many consumers were unaware of this option when looking for a used car. SureFire was initially engaged to manage the PPC aspects of an end of year tactical campaign to sell more cars in 2006. The campaign goal was to generate additional sales by raising consumer awareness and driving increased attendances at auctions.

Strategy and Implementation

The “Turners Price Challenge” campaign was developed in partnership with digital ad agency Brave New World and marketing technology firm Touchpoint. A microsite was built that allowed consumers to enter a car make and model to see what similar vehicles have sold for at recent Turners’ auctions. Given the volume of cars Turners sells this allowed users to get a real sense of a car’s market value rather than rely on car dealers’ inflated window sticker prices. Access to this required user registration and was incentivised with daily prizes ($100 of petrol).

PPC advertising was identified as a key channel for driving visitors to the micro site. An initial two month PPC campaign was set up using Google AdWords, geo-targeted to ensure ads were only shown to New Zealand viewers.

SureFire did extensive keyword research and generated large lists of relevant “head” and “long tail” keywords. These were then separated into thematically related clusters or AdGroups. Specific ad creatives were then developed for each AdGroup and these were continually optimized through A/B split testing to maximize click through rates and conversions (price check registrations).

All ads pointed to the same landing page, so to maximize relevancy SureFire had this modified with dynamic content. This meant the copy of the landing page automatically changed to include the keywords being searched on, so improving page relevancy to both users and search engines, i.e. if a searcher used the keywords “used holden” and clicked on the a Turners ad, the content of the land page changed to feature the relevant make &/or model of the car.

Using dynamic content in landing pages improved their relevancy and therefore Google Quality Score, which in turn was rewarded by Google with reduced average costs per click, so saving Turners money.

Results

The original campaign was a tactical campaign planned to just run for a couple of months. However the PPC campaign performance exceeded projections & substantially out-performed other channels in terms of traffic, conversions & customer acquisition costs. Based on this performance the campaign was extended & SureFire has been retained to provide on-going PPC campaign management.

Since October 2006 SureFire has helped Turners sell more cars. A lot more cars. With above industry average clicks through rates SureFire has been able to drive thousands of people to the Turners website and by using dynamic landing pages have been able to ensure visitors have registered to go along to an auction. SureFire has also succeeded in keeping average position in the paid search rankings high while keeping the CPC low.