Google Ads for video transfer services [2024]

Early in 2024, I received an email from a client who digitizes old video tapes and cine films. They convert almost every legacy video format to USB / DVD / cloud, and had been running several Google Ads campaigns for a couple of years.

Initially the client was after a consultation, which later on turned to ongoing Google Ads management. After a brief review, I figured out that it’d be easier to rebuild the campaigns from scratch. So here’s what I’ve done:

  • keyword research,
  • ad copy revamp,
  • campaign structure improvements.

The initial keyword targeting was quite good: over the years the client collected decent volume of keywords in the campaigns. The main problem was that they (keywords) were in exact match, and over segmented. Not the SKAG way, but still quite unusable, from my point of view. So I did the following:

  1. researched for new keywords using the already existing ones,
  2. created negative keyword lists, based on the results of my research,
  3. clustered the final keywords in more loose ad groups, that are based around a theme (video format in our case).

Here is how the old structure looked like:

And how it does now:

The ad copy part was quite straightforward: for each video format we have it’s own ad group with relevant ads. Though, this part isn’t my favorite, I did enjoy working on it, as there are plenty of details to write about.

As the client operates in London, but serves the whole UK, we ended up having four campaigns:

  • Tape Transfers UK
  • Tape Transfers London
  • Cine Transfers UK
  • Cine Transfers London

Having dedicated London campaigns allowed me to include more tailored ad assets, as I wrote in another case study recently. Later on, we figured out that the tape transfer campaigns have the most value, so it’s where all of our budget was allocated to.

To better leverage smart bidding, I’ve created a portfolio bid strategy, which aggregates more data and allows the machine to optimize the performance across multiple campaigns.

Results

In this account we are tracking calls from both ads and the website, as well as form submissions:

And here is the performance of the old and new campaigns (same number of weeks before and after):

Wondering how I have colored columns? Check out this blog post.

The conversion volume increased significantly, while the CPA decreased. Having a dedicated London campaign with more tailored ad copy clearly pays off with a higher CTR and conversion rate.