Hot Fires

Click Volumes increase by 150% in Three Months

hotfires

The Challenge

www.hotfires.co.uk is an online fire and fireplace warehouse, offering leading brands of gas and electric fires and fireplaces at discount prices. In this very competitive marketplace, their key USPs are price and free delivery.

Hot Fires began running PPC campaigns in-house with Google AdWords in May 2009. However, they found that generic keywords attracted high click costs, consuming about 75% of their budget, while delivering few sales. They joined Latitude Express in October 2009 with the aim of improving their campaigns’ performance and therefore their ROI.

The Solution

  • New campaigns were created for the best selling manufacturers, eg Aga and Morso, with separate adgroups for specific models.
  • We wrote tailored ad copy for the new structure and ad group themes, focusing on brand/model, a price beater guarantee, and free delivery.
  • We used a ‘phrase’ and ‘exact match’ only strategy to ensure no irrelevant clicks were generated by Google’s expanded broad match system.
  • We separated out the generic terms (such as ‘wood burning stoves’) with typically low CTRs, from the longer tail, higher CTR make/model keywords.
  • Our day to day management of the campaign and revision of ad copy ensured the prices in each ad were up to date. This kept the user journey consistent and conversion rates high.

The Results

Since joining Latitude Express, Hotfires.co.uk have seen a month on month increase in click volume, from under 6,000 per month in September 2009 to around 15,000 by December 2009. They have also seen a reduction in average cost per click, from over 20p down to around 16p, without a drop in average position.

In the same period, with our focus on very specific search terms, the spend on broad match dropped from approximately 75% to 0. Of the 1680 keywords in the account that have received 1 or more impressions, 481 (28.6%) have a quality score of 10. 10 of the top 20 most clicked-on keywords have a QS of 10.

“Many of our competitors use PPC, and prices change weekly. With Latitude Express, we can get updated prices into our ads within 20 or 30 minutes, giving us a real advantage over slower competitors. Almost every sale from PPC is either from our Morso or Aga products, so we can see it’s working very, very well.”
Andy Waldron
Manager
Hot Fires

 

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