Thornton & Lowe PPC Case Study

The Client:

Thornton & Lowe was formed in 2009 to support organisations to bid and tender for contracts. Their business is split up into different divisions: bid consultancy, bid training and bid resource. They have also developed a software tool that allowed people to search for tenders called ‘Tender Pipeline’.

The Objective:

Driving quality consultancy leads to Thornton & Lowe’s sales team was the main objective of our paid advertising campaign. Each lead that converts has a high sales potential, so as long as we could generate cost-effective B2B leads, we could achieve a great ROI for the client.

As well as consultancy leads, we also had the challenge of getting new users to use their ‘Tender Pipeline’ software platform, with the plan of converting these customers further down the line.

The Strategy:

Using the appropriate bidding strategies

The bid strategy on a google ads campaign is one of the most important aspects of managing budgets and outbidding your competitors. We chose to start off using manual cost per click to get a good understanding of the bids we needed to generate leads. This allowed us to truly understand which levers we needed to pull to get results.

After building up months and months of conversion data, we then opted to use machine learning to aid the bidding process for us. This meant Google’s algorithm would take some control over which potential customers it bids the most on when they enter a search query. The benefit of this was that the previous conversion data allowed Google to make confident decisions about where to spend the budget.

Implementing multi-step forms

At first we found that the leads coming through from the campaign weren’t always the best. They were also slightly inconsistent too. So, one of the areas we paid a lot of attention to was creating a multi-step form that was optimised for conversions and gave the sales team as much information as possible, before deciding whether to contact them. Pre-qualifying the leads here was essential.

We collect information such as which industry they are in, how big their company is, their company name etc. This meant that anyone who wasn’t a serious business or who wasn’t serious about getting tender help would likely see the questions and not fill the info in.

Communication with the sales team

A lead generation campaign is always 10X more effective when there is clear communication with the sales team. We made sure to speak to the sales team at Thornton & Lowe on a consistent basis to understand the quality of leads and the ROI on them.

We found that over time we had more and more information that we could utilise on our landing pages and ads that would encourage users to take action and fill in a form. Without the back and forth with the sales team, we would have been left in the dark without a true understanding of what is working and how to optimise further.

The Outcome:

Over one year, we have jumped from a 5% conversion rate to a 19% conversion rate on our main campaign.