Metric Theory Founder and COO Jeff Buenrostro accepting the Search Engine Land award for Agency of the Year.

Recycle Away, an SMB provider of recycling bins for businesses and home use, wanted to improve its targeting to businesses while reducing ad spend on residential buyers. The two audiences use the same search queries, so to meet the challenge, Metric Theory devised a five-point strategy using lead-to-revenue attribution tactics, geographic targeting, advanced segmentation for Shopping ads, call tracking technology and account-based marketing initiatives.

“They’re not our biggest client, but they get the same innovative strategy all of our clients do,” said Metric Theory CEO Ken Baker, “This story involved flipping the concept of shopping ads on their head and creating a lead generation strategy with it instead, that led to huge growth in enterprise business leads for them.”

Metric Theory’s SEM campaign for Recycle Away delivered on its goals and earned the agency a top honor at this year’s Search Engine Land Awards when it was named the Agency of the Year Award for SEM.

Attribution tracking and geo-targeting

A majority of Recycle Away’s paid search traffic comes from Shopping ads, which makes quote tracking more challenging. Metric Theory worked with the client to build a cookie system to capture URL parameters on visits from Shopping campaigns in order to tie quotes to the ads for individual products that brought the users. This allowed the team to understand the bigger revenue contribution of individual products, beyond just direct sales. The data was then used to optimize budgets and bids.

Once Metric Theory had a handle on how best to optimize ad spend, the agency developed a geographic targeting strategy that focused on cities that had a high number of large companies and had recently passed recycling ordinances changes.

Metric Theory also injected the relevant location keywords in product titles for Shopping ads using feed management software to increase impression share and CTR in those markets. Advanced shopping segmentation measures allowed Metric Theory to funnel highly targeted searches for business-specific markets to the appropriate products using custom labels.

Tools of the trade

The agency used CallRail’s call tracking solutions combined with quote revenue tracking software to track quotes received by phone — attaching that data back to campaigns and ad groups for more insights around direct response results.

For the account based marketing portion of Recycle Away’s campaign, Metric Theory used Kickfire to identify audiences via IP addresses that could then be fed into Google Ads retargeting campaigns. This tactic drove a 200% lift in click-through rates when measured against comparable campaigns.

Winning results

By the end of the campaign, Metric Theory’s strategy for Recycle Away delivered a 54% jump in direct revenue, a 37% increase in quote submissions and 32% higher pipeline revenue opportunities tied directly to the search marketing efforts on a budget increase of 38% year-over-year.

Baker said the most exciting thing about winning the agency of the year award for this campaign has been the responses he’s received from clients, employees and other agencies.

“[Our clients and employees] are the reason we won and to make them proud means the world to us,” said Baker, “We also received a number of personal notes from executives at other agencies. That meant a lot to us, and also demonstrates the camaraderie in our industry.”

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