Case Study: B2C Software
Case Study
Industry: B2C Software
Timeframe: 6 Months
The Problem
A B2C Software startup made their own Google Search ads with little success, and didn’t know how much they spend per new customer.
Campaign Goals
To launch strong search ads, find a sweet spot for new customer acquisition cost, and use the resulting data for fundraising series B.
We Achieved
%
Lower Cost Per Acquisition
Account and analytics rebuild
We tore down existing ads and built brand new campaigns from scratch to maximize control, and reframed analytics goals to track the right metrics for profitability.
Finding the right market
Sometimes a software’s key features are too expensive to buy on search. We tested not only the front door but all side doors to bring customers into this business and found bright areas of profitability.
Rapid Scale
20x monthly budgets while maintaining profitable CPAs can be challenging. Sage Digi used intricate bid optimization strategy to bring in the most new customers in the company’s history.
Proven Results
In the first 6 months, the company invested ~$92,000 in Google Ads, or ~$15,000 per month. With that budget they acquired 6,049 customers through their website at an average Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) of $15.35, but not all customers who started using their software actually finished the entire lifecycle with their product.
After gathering backend data from their engineers, Sage Digi found the true cost of acquisition was $45, meaning about one third of new customers acquired through Google marketing finish the entire lifecycle with the product. The average cost per click was measured at $2.13, and our team wrote 1,314 different variations of their ads on Google Search, with over 147,000 keywords uploaded over 6 months.
The Search Ads User Flow
Users saw our ads when they entered a series of related keywords on Google Search, which brought them to the company’s website where we measured and established consistent sign-ups and cost per sign-up for the product.
Sage Digi found that once a user logged into the site 20 times, there was a 95% degree of confidence they would complete the entire lifecycle with the software. We sent this data back into Google Search to determine what keywords were entered by users who completed the entire lifecycle. We were then able to calculate a true cost per acquired customer, adjust and test keywords.
We also tested the campaign for upper limits – in other words, we determined if spending 10 times as much on ads brought in 10 times the customers – key data for the company to know as they invest more on ads and to answer key questions for investors. Throughout the entire process, we continuously fed data back into our process to inform how the company invested in Google Search and also to provide the company’s product team with valuable insights into what their customers are searching for.
Sage Digi Drove Down CPA from $79 to $12.09 within just 4 Months
Before we started optimizations, the company’s Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) averaged to $60-80 per customer. Sage Digi began engaging with the company on October 1st, which immediately brought down the CPA. In October the CPA fell to $31 per customer and by December fell to $12.09, a record for the company. In January, we temporarily grew investments to test for the upper limit, bringing in over 1,000 new users that month.
