Case Studies – Lean

Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

This is the story of how our digital marketing efforts enabled the rapid growth of a telemedicine brand from a startup to market leader, scaling conversions on SEM by 2,985% over the course of 4 years while improving the efficiency by 40%.

In this article, we share the top 5 strategies we used to drive 15% YoY growth even in 2022, despite the challenges of post-covid drop in demand and increase in competition.

 

Client Overview

Our client is a nationwide virtual primary care provider that offers a quick and simple alternative to traditional health care. With board-certified doctors licensed in all 50 states and high ratings in app stores, they’re on a mission to help everyone live longer, healthier and happier lives.

 

SEM Growth Throughout the Years

Source: analytical data obtained via Google Ads, 2019 – 2022

 

2019:  +130% Conversions  |  +35% Spend  |  -40% CPA

“The year we took over the account.” — Immediately we started to focus on optimization and efficient expansion. This resulted in over 100% customer base growth at 40% lower cost per customer compared to 2018. Mainly, the strategies that got us there were better traffic control and orchestrating the user’s keyword-ad-landing page flow which led to 97% CvR boost.

 

2020:  +440% Conversions  |  +390% Spend  |  -10% CPA

“The year Covid hit.” — In March 2020 the world changed, and so did the telehealth industry. The natural demand for our existing core keywords grew exponentially, but we also drove significant incremental volume by retesting all the keyword themes that didn’t perform in the past. For many initiatives, we finally had enough volume to build more granular structures and further customize the user flow.

 

2021:  +100% Conversions  |  +165% Spend  |  +30% CPA

“The year Covid continued.” — The industry’s increase in demand was followed by an increase in competition that impacted the CPC. Suddenly, we had doctor chats, symptom checkers, and even Amazon entering the playing field. One of our main strategies focused on ad messaging and repositioning ourselves to stand out in the new competitive landscape, as well as doing extensive landing page testing which led to 12% CvR increase.

 

2022:  +15% Conversions  |  +/-0% Spend |  -15% CPA

“The year Covid ended…” — As of February it seemed like Covid didn’t matter any more. We got the vaccine, several Covid pills, and life was going back to “normal”. Just look at the search demand diving off a cliff on the trendlines below.

Source: publicly available Google Trends data, 2019 – 2022

 

So, how did we maintain a flat spend and almost 15% customer growth year-over-year?

Let’s dive in!

 

The 2022 Challenge & Top 5 Strategies for Success

Without Covid, 2022 was going to be a challenge. We needed to identify new pockets of volume that will help us deliver YoY growth, and we needed to do it fast.

So, we rolled up our sleeves and kept them rolled up in order to stay on top of new keyword expansion opportunities. Here’s the anonymized traffic for a few of our key finds:

Source: anonymized Google Trends data of newly identified keyword themes, 2018 – 2022

 

To identify these much needed volume-drivers we used the following 5 Strategies:

  1. Scraping competitors keyword for any gaps
  2. Tracking the popularity of specific medical conditions
  3. Using internal business data for month-over-month changes in diagnosis and prescription trends
  4. Following FDA medication approvals
  5. Staying on top of seasonal patterns

Then, we just launched fast, optimized faster, and dug for new expansion opportunities again and again.

Needless to say, we continued to focus on optimizations for ad copy and messaging. This time, we perfected the RSA testing strategies, which brought a 15% CTR increase compared to the previous year.

Conclusion

At LeanSEM, experts run your entire PPC operation better than an in-house team. We execute the right ideas faster and better, delivering meaningful results and insights. Our results speak for themselves, and that’s why clients stay in business with us for 5+ years, while the industry average is around 1-2 years.

But, don’t take our word for it…

Testimonial from the client:

The LEAN team’s technical expertise and strategic mindset were crucial for scaling our business over the last few years. The team is highly responsive and reliable, and their performance reports are in-depth, insightful, and consistently accurate. Beyond the day-to-day management of our account, the team is proactive in exploring new ways to drive volume and efficiency in our account. We highly recommend working with LEAN to drive fast growth in performance channels.

 

Check out the LeanSEM methodology and brand promise here.

 

Ivana Janevska

The author

Ivana Janevska

Account Lead and Partner @ Lean

This ad was never paused for 3 years! Here are the results.

This ad was never paused for 3 years! Here are the results.

Client Overview Bloomscape delivers fully-grown, ready-to-go plants to customer’s doors. In short, everything you’ll ever need as a plant parent & greenery lover. We…
Case Study by Google: Performance Max delivers quality B2B customers for Dialpad

Case Study by Google: Performance Max delivers quality B2B customers for Dialpad

If you're still wondering whether Performance Max campaigns can bring real results for you business, the answer is - 100% yes. And here's our…
Learn from the Top Dogs: Winning PPC Tactics from Asana, Monday, ClickUp

Learn from the Top Dogs: Winning PPC Tactics from Asana, Monday, ClickUp

If you want to learn about an industry, pay close attention to what the leaders are doing.  Although it requires a lot of time…

Case Study by Google: Performance Max delivers quality B2B customers for Dialpad

Case Study by Google: Performance Max delivers quality B2B customers for Dialpad

If you’re still wondering whether Performance Max campaigns can bring real results for you business, the answer is – 100% yes. And here’s our proof.

Our client Dialpad faced challenges in driving revenue through their customer acquisition strategy with Google. However, we leveraged Google’s Performance Max to deliver an additional 18% revenue, making this campaign a core part of their marketing strategy.

In this official case study by Google, we explore the approach, results, and the role of LeanSEM’s expertise in Dialpad’s success with Performance Max.

 

Performance Max helped us leverage all Google channels in a very simple way under a single campaign, helping us get nearly 20% more new paying customers for Dialpad.

– Morgan Norman, CMO, Dialpad

 

The Challenge

Dialpad is an industry-leading AI-powered cloud communications platform that was facing challenges driving additional revenue with its customer acquisition strategy with Google. It wanted to increase the volume of high-quality free trials that led to paid Dialpad customers. 

 

The Approach

Dialpad turned to Performance Max, using free trials as the conversion event. For Dialpad, trial signups are high volume, but also correlate well with buying intent, with a typically strong customer conversion rate. The cloud company was then able to leverage existing creative assets from other campaigns to quickly build and launch its Performance Max campaign, enabling them to maximize their reach across Search, Display, Video, Gmail, and the Discover feed.

Partnering with LeanSEM: LeanSEM helped Dialpad use paid customer lists as audience signals and tailor its value propositions for ad copy and creative, and use final URL expansion targeting for landing pages to find additional search queries likely to convert.

 

The Results

Prior to Performance Max, Dialpad was managing more than 30 campaigns across Search, YouTube, and Display. Since launching Performance Max, Dialpad has experienced improvements in both the quality and volume of net new free trials coming through Google Ads. Dialpad was able to uncover a completely new keyword theme with the Performance Max landing page insights report, which contributed to Performance Max delivering an additional 18% in revenue, 17% more Dialpad customer conversions, and 26% increase in trial signups. As a result, Dialpad made Performance Max a permanent part of its marketing strategy. 

 

Source: Official Case Study by Google

© 2022 Google LLC. All rights reserved. Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google LLC. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

 

Lean

The author

Lean

Delivering premium service, better than an in-house team.

Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

This is the story of how our digital marketing efforts enabled the rapid growth of a telemedicine brand from a startup to market leader,…
This ad was never paused for 3 years! Here are the results.

This ad was never paused for 3 years! Here are the results.

Client Overview Bloomscape delivers fully-grown, ready-to-go plants to customer’s doors. In short, everything you’ll ever need as a plant parent & greenery lover. We…
Learn from the Top Dogs: Winning PPC Tactics from Asana, Monday, ClickUp

Learn from the Top Dogs: Winning PPC Tactics from Asana, Monday, ClickUp

If you want to learn about an industry, pay close attention to what the leaders are doing.  Although it requires a lot of time…

Learn from the Top Dogs: Winning PPC Tactics from Asana, Monday, ClickUp

Learn from the Top Dogs: Winning PPC Tactics from Asana, Monday, ClickUp

If you want to learn about an industry, pay close attention to what the leaders are doing.  Although it requires a lot of time and energy spent in research and analysis, the insights are priceless.  You can improve your own marketing game by simply deep diving into your competitors’ PPC strategies.

And that’s exactly what we did. We took the biggest players from the Project Management industry and we performed in-depth market research & analysis.

And we didn’t stop here. We also used our battle-proven methodology to dig out the PPC opportunities and gaps for each of the brands they seemed to miss.

But how’s this research different from the ones that pop up on your LinkedIn feed? This is our own growth method that brings real results.

For the past 8 years, we have successfully managed 91 clients’ PPC accounts from a variety of industries. We have grown accounts from 10x in 1 year to 25x in 2 years. We have done countless analyses, and have developed and implemented many different creative strategies. So you might say we know a thing or two about the PPC game. 

Lean research methodology

We have spent years developing our research processes for a good reason. Without proper research, there cannot be a successful PPC campaign. The pillars of our methodology are:

  • The more you know the better:

research

  • Better means deeper, and deeper means clearer: 

research → analysis & findings 

  • Connecting the dots creates the key:

research → analysis & findings → insights & gaps

  • The key is useless without proper action:

research → analysis & findings → insights & gaps → optimization opportunities

Each of our pillars are explained in this report. The content is divided by the types of research & analysis we performed for each of the 6 brands. Here is why we do each and what type of opportunities we are aiming to find:

Traffic analysis (Who rules the industry)

We identify the kingpin of worldwide website traffic per channel, as this can also be viewed as an indicator of the success of performance marketing brand awareness campaigns. The end goal is to get a first view of the market on a high level. These brands are our competitors. It’s the starting point from where you find out the right direction.

Review analysis (Who is our competition exactly)

If you want to know about a brand, ask the customers. Well, figuratively. Maybe scores alone don’t tell us anything except who is more popular, but customer reviews certainly do. They tell it all and tell it like it is. We scrape the reviews of our competitors and do a sentiment analysis. When the picture is clearer, we use the negative reviews in message development when bidding against them, and we use the positive reviews to recommend areas of improvement to our client.

Pro tip: rely on G2 for B2B, and Trustpilot for service. If the brand has reviews on multiple review sites – merge the data to figure out who the “top dogs” are and who are the “challengers”.

Paid Search Analysis (How to capture the audience with the right intent on Google)

Now that we have a definite list of competitors we identify high-intent industry keywords and understand where our competitors are capturing the most volume by performing a paid search analysis. This is crucial for (i) structuring campaigns and building keyword buckets, (ii) finding keyword gaps where we can be the leaders in the auction, and also (iii) this gives us an idea of where we should allocate a larger portion of the budget.

Ad concepts analysis (How to outsmart the competition on Google)

We can get the keyword & the bid right, and still have 0 clicks on our ads. Google ad copy is the key when it comes to winning ads. We analyze what competitors are communicating on certain keywords to get a sense of what searchers want to read. How? We manually scrape their headline and (again) do a theme/concept analysis. This way we also find out what competitors aren’t communicating which gives us a clear direction for developing copy that stands out from the rest and ultimately gets the most clicks.

Ad concept analysis (Creating intent for our user personas)

On LinkedIn, creating intent is necessary because the user persona whose attention we are trying to get may not already have it. With that in mind, we analyze how others create it and what they miss out on when advertising. Again we are finding gaps and creating opportunities by using these insights to improve our ad development strategy (from creative to headline to copy).

Landing page analysis (Optimizing for conversions)

The landing page is a make-or-break step in the flow. Either we get people to convert here, or they drop off, and it becomes three times harder to get them to convert later on. We took a granulated approach to find the differences, the gaps, and some inspiration.

Want to learn the secret PPC tactics that will give you an edge in the competitive world of project management? We got you covered. Download the report now, it’ll only be available for a limited time.👇

Lean

The author

Lean

Delivering premium service, better than an in-house team.

Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

This is the story of how our digital marketing efforts enabled the rapid growth of a telemedicine brand from a startup to market leader,…
This ad was never paused for 3 years! Here are the results.

This ad was never paused for 3 years! Here are the results.

Client Overview Bloomscape delivers fully-grown, ready-to-go plants to customer’s doors. In short, everything you’ll ever need as a plant parent & greenery lover. We…
Nenad Molerovich: Don't Sell, Gift Your Company to Your Team! Shifting the Paradigm of Company Building

Nenad Molerovich: Don't Sell, Gift Your Company to Your Team! Shifting the Paradigm of Company Building

I'm looking to give back over 90% of my company to people who will truly make it thrive, only the top business and marketing…
Lean

The author

Lean

Delivering premium service, better than an in-house team.

If you found this article useful, be sure to have a look here

Celebrating 10 Years of Growth: Our Journey from SEM to Full-Service Excellence

Celebrating 10 Years of Growth: Our Journey from SEM to Full-Service Excellence

A decade ago, when Nenad Molerovich founded what was then LeanSEM, there wasn’t a grand blueprint for a certain “type” of agency. Instead, we…
Interview with our Partners: Andrej Vangelski

Interview with our Partners: Andrej Vangelski

We recently sat down with Andrej, one of Lean’s pioneering Partners since 2018! In this interview, we asked him to reflect on his transformative…
Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

This is the story of how our digital marketing efforts enabled the rapid growth of a telemedicine brand from a startup to market leader,…
Lean

The author

Lean

Delivering premium service, better than an in-house team.

If you found this article useful, be sure to have a look here

Celebrating 10 Years of Growth: Our Journey from SEM to Full-Service Excellence

Celebrating 10 Years of Growth: Our Journey from SEM to Full-Service Excellence

A decade ago, when Nenad Molerovich founded what was then LeanSEM, there wasn’t a grand blueprint for a certain “type” of agency. Instead, we…
Interview with our Partners: Andrej Vangelski

Interview with our Partners: Andrej Vangelski

We recently sat down with Andrej, one of Lean’s pioneering Partners since 2018! In this interview, we asked him to reflect on his transformative…
Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

This is the story of how our digital marketing efforts enabled the rapid growth of a telemedicine brand from a startup to market leader,…
Lean

The author

Lean

Delivering premium service, better than an in-house team.

If you found this article useful, be sure to have a look here

Celebrating 10 Years of Growth: Our Journey from SEM to Full-Service Excellence

Celebrating 10 Years of Growth: Our Journey from SEM to Full-Service Excellence

A decade ago, when Nenad Molerovich founded what was then LeanSEM, there wasn’t a grand blueprint for a certain “type” of agency. Instead, we…
Interview with our Partners: Andrej Vangelski

Interview with our Partners: Andrej Vangelski

We recently sat down with Andrej, one of Lean’s pioneering Partners since 2018! In this interview, we asked him to reflect on his transformative…
Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

This is the story of how our digital marketing efforts enabled the rapid growth of a telemedicine brand from a startup to market leader,…
Lean

The author

Lean

Delivering premium service, better than an in-house team.

If you found this article useful, be sure to have a look here

Celebrating 10 Years of Growth: Our Journey from SEM to Full-Service Excellence

Celebrating 10 Years of Growth: Our Journey from SEM to Full-Service Excellence

A decade ago, when Nenad Molerovich founded what was then LeanSEM, there wasn’t a grand blueprint for a certain “type” of agency. Instead, we…
Interview with our Partners: Andrej Vangelski

Interview with our Partners: Andrej Vangelski

We recently sat down with Andrej, one of Lean’s pioneering Partners since 2018! In this interview, we asked him to reflect on his transformative…
Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

This is the story of how our digital marketing efforts enabled the rapid growth of a telemedicine brand from a startup to market leader,…
Lean

The author

Lean

Delivering premium service, better than an in-house team.

If you found this article useful, be sure to have a look here

Celebrating 10 Years of Growth: Our Journey from SEM to Full-Service Excellence

Celebrating 10 Years of Growth: Our Journey from SEM to Full-Service Excellence

A decade ago, when Nenad Molerovich founded what was then LeanSEM, there wasn’t a grand blueprint for a certain “type” of agency. Instead, we…
Interview with our Partners: Andrej Vangelski

Interview with our Partners: Andrej Vangelski

We recently sat down with Andrej, one of Lean’s pioneering Partners since 2018! In this interview, we asked him to reflect on his transformative…
Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

Scaling a telehealth client within 4 years with 30x SEM Growth and 40% higher efficiency

This is the story of how our digital marketing efforts enabled the rapid growth of a telemedicine brand from a startup to market leader,…