[Case Study]: BrightStar Care – A Search Marketing Success Story

Background:

BrightStar Care came to us with a very simple, but very common, marketing challenge – how do we leverage corporate digital advertising efforts to drive growth at the local level? It’s a common dilemma that has plagued multi-location brands for years and one that Mindstream Media Group has addressed for a variety of our clients.

The reason a lot of our clients have had these difficulties is because many agencies don’t focus on individual local campaigns, preferring to manage centralized national campaigns. Why? Because it’s tough to manage local campaigns, but we know it’s worth it. Our innovative local techniques allow us to achieve a level of success that “one-size-fits-all” national campaigns often can’t deliver.

Localizing campaigns relies on us being able to take a top-down and a bottom-up approach. This means paying equal attention to corporate and location marketing goals to deliver brand-compliant campaigns that produce the maximum number of leads for each location. We use sophisticated bidding and targeting methods to hone in on the users who are most likely to deliver conversions, eschewing cosmetic KPIs like clicks and conversions that might look good on a spreadsheet but don’t do as much to drive our ROI.

Execution:

Our SEM team built all the individual location’s Google Ads accounts from scratch – including keyword research, campaigns, ad groups, ad copy, keyword match types, settings, landing pages and conversion tracking.

Here are the tools we used to scale our work across BrightStar Care’s 300+ locations:

  • Kenshoo Local for account creation and management.
  • Google Ads bid rules to ensure performance-based bidding strategies were in place and customized to each location’s data.
  • Call tracking and Ads conversion tracking for proper call attribution from ads, websites and form fills to each franchise location.
  • Keyword-level conversion tracking to optimize spend toward the search queries generating the best leads and best cost per lead (CPL).

Campaign management:

We actively enhance all available elements within Google Ads for all locations to make sure we’re optimizing every aspect of the campaigns to drive the best performance possible.

This performance-driven approach has brought tremendous success for BrightStar Care: We beat our own CPL goal by 56 percent and BrightStar Care has seen more of its locations achieve or exceed monthly lead goals than ever before in its history.

We optimized campaigns by testing:

  • New keywords
  • Bidding strategies
  • Ad copy
  • Ad extensions
  • Dayparting
  • Location bid adjustments
  • Device bid adjustments
  • Demographic targeting

Defining success:

BrightStar Care defined success by three factors which we used to drive strategic decisions:

  1. Percentage of franchise locations who hit monthly lead goals.
  2. The number of leads driven system-wide.
  3. System-wide CPL figures.

Results:

With just a 0.43 percent increase in campaign spending, we saw the following year-over-year improvements.

  • Conversion rate increased by 10 percent
  • Conversions increased by 31 percent
  • CPL decreased by 23 percent
  • Cost per click (CPC) decreased by 16 percent
  • Click-thru rate (CTR) increased by 98 percent

Performance highlights:

  • May had the lowest CPL ($25.60) in any month since launching the program in 2015.
  • In June, 97 percent of territories reached the minimum lead goal, which was the highest percentage to reach the lead goal of all time. Five out of the last six months have had above 90 percent of territories reach their lead goals.

Contact us today to learn more about localized paid search programs from Mindstream Media Group.