With 9 facilities across Adelaide and almost 40 years of industry-leading experience, U-Store-It is one of Adelaide's leading self-storage businesses.
In the middle of 2019, we conducted a Complete Digital Audit of their digital marketing efforts and also reviewed their competitor activity.
After completing the audit, we quickly learned that the best way to describe the self-storage industry is by using the title of the trendy American reality TV series, 'Storage Wars'.
There are numerous self-storage providers in South Australia, many of which also advertise online, specifically through Google Search. That meant high competition for many industry-related search terms.
This article explains how we identified which keywords were more contested than others, and how we were able to bid more competitively, beyond simple keyword bidding.
The Auction Insights report
The Auction Insights report allows you to compare your performance against other advertisers who are participating in the same auctions (bidding on the same keywords). Learn more about the Auction Insights report here.
For U-Store-It, this report let us compare their competitive performance, measured by their 'Absolute top of page rate' and 'Impression share' for top converting keywords, against their competitors.
'Absolute top of page rate' tells us how often our ad was shown at the absolute top of the page, as the very first ad above the organic search results. See the example below.
Being positioned higher in the Google search results matters because of the 'F'-shaped pattern that describes how users tend to read search results. You can see this in the heat-map below, shared by UX Planet.
Impression share
Think of the metric 'Impression Share' like the more commonly known metric, 'Market Share'.
Impression Share is the percentage of impressions you have received, divided by the estimated number of impressions that you could have received.
The implications of this metric are simple.
When the Market Ease team found a top converting keyword with only a small 'Impression Share', we knew there was an opportunity to allocate more budget and resources to that keyword.
However, when we found a top converting keyword with a high 'Impression Share', we knew that bidding more competitively on that term would yield minimal improvements.
For U-Store-It, we applied what we learned from the Auction Insights report to identify which keywords had the opportunity to increase their Impression Share and their absolute top of page positioning, and acted accordingly.
Layered keyword bidding
As mentioned on our Google Ads service page, placing bids at just the keyword level is only basic Google Ads marketing.
Google has many other ways in which an advertiser can bid more (or less) competitively on a keyword that is more (or less) likely to convert.
Information such as the hour of the day, the day of the week, the user's postcode and what they're in the market to buy can all be used as levers to alter a keyword's bid.
This is important, because we were able to not only bid more competitively on top keywords, but also reduce U-Store-It's wasted ad spend on searches during poor times of the day, or from irrelevant postcodes.
The results
Since collaborating, U-Store-It's cost per conversion has reduced by 37% and their key conversions (number of new leads) have increased by 112%.
In addition to these direct benefits, U-Store-It has gained a better understanding of their audience and, with layered bidding strategies, is making it harder for competitors to replicate their Google Ads campaigns.
"In the four months that we've been with Market Ease, our sales have grown, our leads have grown, and we're on and up from here."
