We believe we have the right staff, products, selection and service standards for our market but when it came to online – while we were doing OK – we knew we could achieve at a higher level. Working with Permission has helped us in a number of different areas understand what that next level is and how to get there in simple, understandable and practical ways.

– Steve Preston – Managing Director – Choice Catering Equipment

Sometimes clients engage Permission to help them improve on the success they have already achieved. This was the case when the team at Choice Catering Equipment came to Permission as a referral from their then web developer who had built their e-commerce-enabled website.

They arrived with the single task of improving the effectiveness of their Google AdWords advertising. This type of traffic had already proven itself with its positive ‘order converting’ traffic. Now they wanted to engage some specialist campaign management resource to build on their work to date.

To start with, Permission completed a comprehensive review of their AdWords account. This work generated a comprehensive list of optimizing suggestions. One of these was to increase the negative keywords the account was using. (Negative keywords are those that can sneak in between good keywords and, by doing so, make them unsuitable. For instance, the keyword “second hand” when you are bidding on “gas ovens” and you only sell new products.)

By reviewing previous AdWords reports, the Permission team could see that there were a sizable number of clicks coming from keyword phrases that included negative-style terms. This was resulting in wasted clicks that were churning through a sizable proportion of the monthly AdWords budget.

To fix this, both teams reviewed historical reports from months of click data and produced a long list of keywords that were in future to be categorised as negative and, as such, would not be responsible for showing future ads for the incorrect search phrases. This list was then uploaded into the Choice AdWords account – effectively doubling their previous negative keyword list. (This list has continued to grow each month as more negative terms have been added as Permission continues to trawl through the company’s click reports looking for instances of any new negative words.)

The team at Choice enjoyed two benefits from this work being completed. The first was the obvious saving of wasted click cost on these non-relevant keywords. The second was more subtle and related to the positive way in which Google views and consequently provides a bid pricing advantage (reduced cost) to advertisers who have above-average click-through rates for their ads. (The click-through rate is defined as the percentage of searchers that see your ad out of the total number that click on it). The long list of negative keywords now ensured that their ads were more likely to be shown only for relevant searchers and thus were being clicked more frequently during the periods they were shown, which increased their click-through rate.

So, with these paid advertising costs now under better management, Permission was then asked to turn its focus towards the organic traffic the site received from Google and present some suggestions. This traffic source represented a sizable chunk of the total visitor count. The structure and design of the website was helping things here. Fortunately, it had been built in such a way that made it relatively easy for Google to properly index for the vast range of product terms the business supplied.

Permission began its hunt for improvements by embarking on a process of extensive keyword research. As a result of this they located a selection of keywords that had a high search volume but a comparatively low ranking for the Choice website. A few of these required immediate work and Permission presented a series of straightforward alterations that rectified the issue and moved the rankings upwards from where they were struggling previously.

The Google Analytics website reporting application was being used to track the outcomes of all the changes during this period. And, while it provided some good general information that was ideal in guiding the early changes the site required, it lacked specific e-commerce sales detail that was necessary to track the effectiveness of the more subtle site changes required in the future. Permission had experience with configuring Analytics to work this way on sites it already managed and it worked with Choice and their web development team to ensure the necessary tracking changes were made and successfully implemented.