New Century Financial Increases Conversions Six Times Over & Cuts CPA by 80%
The Goal
Grow client base
How We Did It
Product: Financial cash flow solutions
Strategy: Disrupt an antiquated market
The baseline monthly lead volume
Cut CPA down by 80% from a level previously unsustainable
Conversion rate skyrocketed
New Century Financial offers invoice-based, receivables-based, and other types of factoring services. Essentially, NCF purchases receivables at a slight discount, and extends immediate funding to businesses in return. This is a good way for businesses to offload risk and gain access to quick working capital. New Century Financial was founded in 1985 and has been serving customers for over 25 years. They serve a variety of industries and are known for their exceptional customer service and no-hassle, 24 hour streamlined approval process.
The Challenge
New Century Financial came to HawkSEM after having been let down time and time again by other PPC agencies that promised big returns they couldn’t ultimately deliver. NCF needed a partner that truly understood their space, with a substantial amount of experience in the financial services sector broadly, and in the factoring business more specifically. In other words, they needed an agency that not only talked the talk, but also walked the walk. Here’s what we had to work with:
- Their CPA was exorbitantly and prohibitively high at over $1,000 per lead
- Lead quality was poor, engagement and time on site were suboptimal, best practices like extensions weren’t adequately deployed
- The landing page was dated, with proper tracking and proper utilization of data missing entirely
Because NCF had plenty of years spent experimenting with digital marketing initiatives, we knew there was a lot of data to work with — all it needed was an expert team to utilize and act on the information appropriately.
The Solution
What got NCF towards the right path and ultimately led to their success was a concerted, comprehensive plan of action. Towards the beginning, we spent lots of time and effort communicating with their team to fully understand their pain points, customer personas, product offering, conversion funnel, creative assets, and overall messaging. It was during this phase that we realized the necessity of a concurrent, multi-pronged approach.
We began with campaign reorganization, optimization, enhancement, and intelligent segmentation. Campaigns were restructured according to best practices, waste was cut out, winners pressed harder, and we applied proper upward and downward bid adjustments to segments based on their relative success. We got rid of certain cost sinks altogether by looking at their history, conversion rate, and CPA.
At the same time, we created a new landing page that dramatically improved the conversion rate and cut the CPA. These initial pushes were enough to get NCF humming along at a very healthy positive ROI, but we didn’t stop there. We tagged every digital NCF interaction with our proprietary set of parameters so that useful data would be properly stored and reported back to us.
With keyword-level data, we were able to go a step deeper and not only optimize based on leads, but on the very keywords that generated final deals.
On top of properly tagging web leads, NCF also wanted HawkSEM to implement intelligent call tracking so that we would be able to open up that channel, trace everything back to the original keyword, and find out how the sales team might work to improve.
On top of all this, we substantially expanded their negative keyword list to get our keyword schema down to an even more efficient core.
The Results
In the world of digital marketing, the work is never really done. However, after the aforementioned actions were put into place, HawkSEM was able to help NCF undergo a radical transformation that situates them firmly in a place of success.
NCF now has an efficient engine in place to bring in leads at a healthy cost and realize positive ROI. Because of the results we were able to drive, NCF continues to expand the scope of work that they’ve entrusted to HawkSEM. They trust us to manage their PPC, SEO, landing pages, and reporting and tracking — they’ve brought us on as a partner in additional projects as well.
When we first brought onboard to help NCF engineer the turnaround they sorely needed, CPA was at over $1,000 — today, that number is closer to $200. In addition, the conversion rate went from 2.5% to nearly 10%. We are now able to bring in more than 5x the original monthly run rate of conversions, and nearly 50% more clicks per month, at about the same level of ad spend. The relationship continues to grow, and we continue to work closely with NCF to unlock even more value for them.
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