Fox Symes offers a range of debt consolidation solutions, which include budgeting assistance, informal creditor arrangements, arrangement of third party debt consolidation loans and mortgage finance, debt agreements, personal insolvency agreements, and bankruptcy assistance. Fox Symes helps over 100,000 Australians each year resolve their debt and take back financial control.

The marketing team at Fox Symes uses multiple marketing channels and started using AdWords in the early 2000s. The firm’s main advertising goal is to maximize conversions while maintaining or decreasing cost-per-action(CPA). For Fox Symes, a conversion occurs when a potential client contacts the firm—either by phone or by filling out its online form.

Reaching multi-screen users with enhanced campaigns

Over the past three years, Fox Symes noticed a dramatic increase in nondesktop visitors to its website. The company’s marketers knew that enhanced campaigns could help them reach potential clients across screens, so they upgraded the firm’s campaigns in April 2013. Enhanced campaigns are designed for today’s multi-screen world, offering the ability to manage bids across devices, locations, and times of day, all from a single campaign. By upgrading to enhanced campaigns, Fox Symes’ ads would automatically show on desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets—with no additional effort required on the part of the firm. To complement the firm’s multi-screen ads, the team opted into showing ads on the Google Display Network (GDN). Fox Symes wanted to extend its reach and knew the GDN would help to get the firm’s ads in front of potential customers who were browsing on news sites, blogs and other relevant sites across the Internet.

Launch and Iterate

After a first round of tests with its new advertising set up, Fox Symes realized its results were not optimal: the firm’s tablet ads were receiving a high volume of clicks, but a low number of conversions, which resulted in a higher CPA. Based on these results, Fox Symes made two key changes. First, the firm’s marketers focused its efforts on only the best performing Google Display Network placements. Then they implemented Display Conversion Optimizer to help optimize bids and maximize conversions across devices. The Display Conversion Optimizer is a feature within AdWords that uses historical conversion data and a wide range of auction-level variables such as users location, operating system, browser, time zone, site content, creative, time since visit, and device to improve campaign results.

Second Time’s a Charm

Fox Symes started a four-week trial with this new set up, and saw promising results during the first week. By week three, results were so good that the firm decided to fully implement the trial setup. Between the first and second trial, conversions increased by 227 percent and CPA decreased by 5 percent. Segmenting performance by device also yielded compelling results: desktop conversions increased by 1,500 percent and CPA decreased by 43 percent and tablet conversions—which were lower in the initial test—increased by 1000 percent with a CPA decrease of 88 percent. Richard Metzger, Head of Marketing for Fox Symes says of the firm’s results: “Through detailed analysis on original campaign performance across devices and a clear understanding on how enhanced campaigns operate, we were able to create new campaigns which take full advantage of enhanced campaigns’ features. The results have been more than impressive.”

###

For further information, please contact
Christopher Lee, Online Marketing Manager, Fox Symes,
(02) 8985 5121
[email protected]
www.foxsymes.com.au