Champion Home Exteriors Partners with Chacka Marketing to Restructure its Paid Search Program, Driving 40% More Appointments and Increased Efficiencies
BACKGROUND
With over six decades of experience and expertise, Champion Windows and Home Exteriors in one of the nation’s leading home improvement companies. Champion transforms homes with premium-quality products that are designed, built, installed, and guaranteed by Champion. Every product the company offers – from new windows and sunrooms, to siding, roofing, and entry doors – is built right here in the USA, backed by industry-leading limited lifetime warranties, and comes recommended by more than 9 out of 10 recent Champion customers.
CHALLENGE
In the fall of 2016, Champion Home Exteriors partnered with Chacka Marketing to help scale in-home estimate appointment volume. Leading up to the partnership, Champion Home Exteriors reached a plateau, due in large part to the structure of its paid search program and the related innate challenges.
Historically, Champion Home Exteriors had 4-6 separate paid search campaigns (one for each product category; i.e., windows, siding, roofing, etc.) for each of its 50 demographic market areas (DMAs). In aggregate, the previous structure required 229 campaigns in Google alone (458 across Google and Bing). All match types were treated equally and lumped together within campaigns.
Finite budgets and the dilution of campaigns resulted in strong keyword performers cannibalization by lower-affinity, lower-performing keywords, ultimately impeding Champion Home Exteriors ability to scale appointment volume.
SOLUTION
To address this challenge, Chacka Marketing proposed a paid search restructure maximizing ad spend, budget allocation and exposure on higher performing keyword subsets. The proposed structure contained the following requirements:
- Brand – Fully-Funded
- Target all DMAs in one campaign
- Broken out by exact, phrase and broad match keywords
- Non-Brand Exact – Fully-Funded
- Target all DMAs in one campaign (exact match only)
- Non-Brand Broad & Phrase
- Two campaigns per DMA (one broad, one phrase)
The proposed structure reduced the total number of campaigns from 458 to 200 and appropriately grouped top-performing keyword subsets to maximize budgets and mitigate cannibalization.
RESULTS
While the proposed restructure presented challenges in effectively forecasting spend and appointments at the market-level, it was successful in scaling appointment volume for Champion Home Exteriors and its paid search program as a whole.
Comparing Q1 2016 with Q1 2017, the restructure resulted in 1,354 more appointments (a 40% increase) at a lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA) (1.44% more efficient). Additionally, both the appointments delivered and the actual CPA achieved exceeded the forecast by 5% respectively.
