Categories Name : SEARCH and PPC CAMPAIGNS

Sub-Category : BEST PPC

Entry Name (Campaign) : Proximity-Based SEM Strategy for Bridgestone

Covering Note / Overall Experience

Bridgestone India had launched an ambitious initiative called the “Select Online Program” to help drive more O2O (online to offline) leads for its “Bridgestone Select” group of dealers. As part of this initiative, they had put in a lot of effort in bringing 70% of their ‘Select dealers’ online with published GMB (Google My Business) listings.

The goal now was to increase the overall online visibility and drive more leads for the Select dealers. However, with tyres being a low margin business Bridgestone had an aggressive CPL (cost per lead) target within which we had to operate.

We decided to solve this challenge with an innovative proximity-based SEM campaign that focused on delivering 2 core objectives:

1. Improve conversion rates for dealers who were doing well on search visibility but weren't converting as well as they should be.
2. Increase the search visibility for non-performing dealers and drive leads by bringing them to average network visibility.

The campaign proved to be a massive success as Bridgestone recorded a 33% increase in their monthly leads and their CPL (cost per lead) dropped by 20X. Not just that, the campaign generated 1.5 Crores in revenue with an ad-spend of 7.41 Lakhs, delivering an ROI of 2023%

Concept

With more than 3.5 million monthly searches happening across 200K tyre-related keywords, the Internet presents a huge opportunity for the tyre industry in India. Bridgestone wanted to capitalize on this opportunity by empowering its “Bridgestone Select Dealers” with a strong online presence.

Taking insights from Google India, which reported a 75% Y-o-Y increase in “near me” searches we formulated a proximity-based SEM strategy. We created a campaign that intelligently leveraged a searcher’s nearness to a Bridgestone dealer location. The strategy was further expanded with dynamic radius targeting and a smart bidding methodology to ensure that different Bridgestone dealers in a dense locale would not compete for the same online spot. This unique setup ensured that all dealers within Bridgestone’s network get optimal search visibility.

Innovation

Once Bridgestone had completed the arduous task of bringing 70% of its Select dealers online, there was a lot of data being generated via GMB (Google My Business) Insights. We innovated by funnelling the data from hundreds of Bridgestone dealers into a custom Data Studio report to create a “digital maturity index” for the entire dealer network.

Armed with a dashboard view of the entire dealer network, there were 2 core insights that defined our objectives:

• One - There were dealers who were performing well on search but needed help converting those views/searches to actions like clicks, calls and store visits.
• Two - There were a lot of dealers that weren't doing too well on their discoverability metrics at all, and needed to be brought up to average network visibility.

A deeper dive into the data suggested that a handful of markets were responsible for the majority of searches and leads, as consumers in these cities had adopted online search for tyres faster than others.

Based on this finding, we focused on cities where the online market opportunity seemed to be larger, in order to achieve our core objectives. This led us to create a multi-faceted SEM strategy where we divided Bridgestone’s dealer base into 18 proximity-based campaigns to drive optimal performance.

Execution

Basis the insights from the digital maturity index, we decided to build out a proximity based campaign to deliver an optimal performance for all dealers on Bridgestone’s network. This required a lot of planning as we had to carefully map out locales where the dealer density was higher as opposed to areas where less dealers were present.

We solved this challenge with 18-different campaigns which all ran in tandem. The campaigns were structured intelligently to control bidding and drive optimization. Any city that had more than 10 Bridgestone select dealers, got it’s own dedicated campaign which we referred to as “metro-campaign”. And all cities with less than 10 dealers would fall under a larger umbrella of a “state-wide” campaign.

We connected the GMB listings for the entire dealer network with Google Ads to drive location extensions and hyper target searches with “near me”, “nearby” and “in city” variants. With dynamic radius targeting, varying from 2KM to 5KM, we further ensured that every dealer gets the perfect visibility. Smart bidding was setup to drive “more actions” for dealers getting good visibility and less conversions.

Each campaign was A/B tested to determine the best converting traffic source across desktop and mobile. With “call” action from mobile reporting the best CTR as well as CPA we scaled the overall campaign to drive an increased monthly call volume.

Finally, a 30-day lookback window was setup to track store visit conversions to better track online visibility as a major contributor to a dealer’s business.

Results

When the rubber met the road, the results were outstanding –

• In key markets, Bridgestone doubled the conversion rates for their Select dealers.
• 72% of dealers who were non-performers on search were brought up to the average network visibility.
• Bridgestone’s monthly call volume increased from 7.5K-8K calls to 10K-11K calls, delivering a 33% increase in their monthly leads volume.
• The campaign also helped Bridgestone reduce their average CPL (cost per lead) by 20.11X, which meant a staggering 95% saving on overall lead acquisition costs.
• The best part -- the campaign generated ₹1.5 Crore in revenue with an ad-spend of only ₹7.41 Lakh, delivering a phenomenal 2023% ROI for Bridgestone.

With tyres being a low margin business our SEM campaign was able to deliver true business impact for Bridgestone and its select family dealers.