Charles Stanley set us the challenge of delivering improved performance from their PPC campaigns. In a highly regulated industry, with multiple stakeholders to govern marketing activities and an everchanging market, the breif called for exceptionally high levels of service, reporting and flexibility.

We restructured the PPC account to open up opportunities to attract new customers, and applied a creative and intelligent data driven approach to deliver improved results in this highly competitive market. With thousands of investment funds, trusts and shares available to trade, deciding which ones to promote with PPC required some smart thinking and detailed data analysis.

By keeping a close eye on trading trends and using our market leading reports, we adjusted budgets and bids for hundreds of campaigns as different funds, trusts and shares constantly go in and out of favour with the direct investor. This deep dive into the workings of the market and inventive use of trading data is typical of our approach and part of the way we get better results.

Strong numbers of new users opening accounts and transferring investments and a continued focus on high efficiency by closely monitoring CPA.

The success of the PPC campaigns has allowed us to collaborate with Charles Stanley on a wide range of projects including a strategic review of their digital offering, radio adverts, Google Local optimisation for their branch network, Google analytics audit and sponsored Tweet campaigns.

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As a long standing client we have a sound insight into their service and customer, along with lots of ideas about how to enhance their website performance. One key opportunity was to increase revenue from new and returning customers through adopting a content strategy with objectives to improve SEO for article pages and produce engaging content to link to from their emails..

Our approach was to routinely compile and publish articles aligned to the two core users intended for the content; small business owners looking for custom printing options and existing customers who would benefit from and be interested in broader small business insight.

To ensure topics were aligned to the sectors and seasonality of the audiences we reviewed user order patterns, explored keyword volumes and undertook research into core sectors to better plan topic timings. This meant we had a pretty good idea of what users were interested in and when.

Next came the fun part: writing a range of purposeful articles, incorporating relevant and useful links, information and advice. By adopting an authoritative but relatable tone of voice we were able to produce articles that resonated with the audience. Copy was of course optimised to rank well in search engines, along with ensuring titles and metadata was well thought through.

Ever the data fans, we monitored key metrics including traffic levels, page value and page performance indicators to gain insights into performance and continually adapt our approach based on the learnings.

We have seen consistent month on month improvements for organic sessions to the article pages and the quality of the content is reflected in improved bounce rates and page duration. Uplifted pages per session and page value are also a testament to the effectiveness of the content in driving onward journeys and conversions.

We’ve seen a good response from the email audience too; with improved click through rates on emails with articles and onward actions and conversions from the sessions.

Going one step further to support Avery WePrint with SEO improvements, we analysed the key products and sectors to produce a gap analysis of missing article content.

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The Centre for Ageing Better believes that more people living longer represents a huge opportunity for society and they want everyone to live a good later life. But changes are needed so more people are in good health, are financially secure, are socially connected, and have a sense of meaning and purpose in later life.

Strange has been working with Ageing Better for the last three years and have recently won the contract to continue working with them for up to three more years. As an agency, we are really proud of the lasting relationships we build with our clients, but more than that, we are proud of the results we are able to deliver for them.

One of the challenges we were facing managing the Google Grants account for Ageing Better was being able to deploy the full budget each month. We were noticing that standard search spend was flat YoY, so we needed to find a solution that was going to increase spend through the account whilst still being able to meet the client’s objectives and the Grants policies outlined by Google.

We had previously run some low level DSA campaigns with some success so wanted to see what more could be achieved with this campaign type. Our approach resulted in building out a complete DSA strategy that ensured full coverage of the website. Running this alongside the standard search campaigns opened up a whole new area of search that we had not previously been targeting. Careful search term report analysis meant we were able to build robust negative keyword lists to minimise wastage and maintain quality traffic reaching the website, whilst beginning to scale the account. 

As a result, we saw some staggering growth YoY. 

• Spend increased by 84%
• There was an 88% increase in impressions
• We generated a 20% increase in traffic to the website

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Holiday France Direct came to us with a brief to solve 3 business challenges. Firstly to upgrade their website site to improve targetting of potential customers, secondly to set up and manage a programme of monthly onsite and offsite SEO activity and thirdly run their social media channels for them. 

With thousands of properties located in popular destinations, we knew that Holiday France Direct could benefit from better organic traffic generated through an SEO programme.

We introduced a blog and content marketing strategy to help position Holiday France Direct as an authoritative information source. Keyword research and analysis of PPC traffic patterns showed a number of opportunities to increase the visibility of their inventory through renaming and relabeling to match user search language.

Search language also varied from region to region, even in close neighbours like Brittany and Normandy, so we took the optimisations down to a local level, producing curated lists of accommodation properties to match the demand shown in search.

Alongside this, social media properties were created on Facebook, Twitter,  Instagram and Pinterest to further reach and engage with their target audience.

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In order to deliver to the objectives we devised a complex campaign plan that was focused on three key areas.

The first was on timings to maximise spend in key periods, the second was around targeting to ensure we used channels where we could effectively deploy ads to target core audiences, and finally personalisation ensured we delivered compelling ads to relevant audiences. 

To inform timings, we analysed data from the website and other sources to get a lay down of when users were considering a visit and when they were most likely to book. We also undertook a research piece to analyse the time gap between booking the visit to visiting the resort, with consideration of seasonality and school holidays. This helped us understand when best to deploy ads for awareness and after what period a booking focused message is better used. The outcome was a dual phase plan that related to specific audiences throughout the campaign period. 

At this stage we were able to define the best channels to balance awareness and direct response requirements. We took an agnostic approach to channel selection, choosing platforms based on historical performance and digital insight. The result was a channel mix that included Google Search, Facebook Ads, YouTube and Display. 

The final step was to create a flexible ad plan that combined best practise on digital, with alignment to the wider campaign creative and incorporated a balanced mix of attractions and events messages. Through structured ad testing we were able to refine and improve ad performance on an ongoing basis, taking a personalised approach to copy and creative for the core audiences and their locations. 

Throughout the campaign we were proactive and data-led to continually optimise campaigns to meet the objectives. We also performed deeper campaign reviews at routine intervals, including at the end of each year, to sense check strategy from our results and use insight from the wider campaign team when it was available. 

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