How U-Store-It Became The Dominant Industry Leader In The Self-Storage Space
With 9 facilities located across Adelaide and almost 40 years of industry leading experience, U-Store-It is 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 available in South Australia, many of which also advertise online, specifically through Google Search. Which meant high competition for many industry related search terms.
This article explains how we were able to identify which keywords were more contested than others and how we were able to bid more competitively - beyond simple keyword bidding.
Auctions Insights Report
The Auctions 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 Auctions Insights report here.
So, for U-Store-It, this report enables us to compare their competitive performance, determined by their 'Absolute top of the page rate' and 'Impression share' for top converting keywords against their competitors.
'Absolute top of the page rate' tells us how often our ad was shown at the absolute top of the page, as the very first ad above organic search results. See the example below.
The reason being positioned higher in the Google Search results is important, is because of the 'F' shaped pattern that depicts how users tend to read the search results. This can be seen from the heat-map below shared by UX Planet.
Now, 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 would find a top converting keyword, with only a small 'Impression Share', we knew that there was an opportunity to allocate more budget and resources for this keyword.
However, when we would find a top converting keyword with high 'Impression Share', we knew that bidding more competitively on this term would yield minimal improvements.
For U-Store-It, we were able to apply the information learned from the Auctions Insight report, to identify which keywords had opportunity to increase their Impression Share and their absolute top of page positioning and act accordingly.
Layered Keyword Bidding
As mentioned in 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 now we were able to not only bid more competitively on top keywords, but, we were also able to reduce U-Store-It's wasted ad spend on searches during poor times of the day, or by identifying searches from irrelevant post codes.
Above is a table published by Google, which shows at which levels an advertiser can layer their bidding for various Google Campaigns.
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 also has obtained a better understanding of their audience and with layered bidding strategies, are making it harder for competitors to replicate their Google Ad campaigns.
Andrew Eastwood
Managing Director
U-Store-It
“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.” - Andrew, Managing Director