CASE STUDY

ESW

New York City, NY

Situation

Located in the heart of New York City, Excelhelp.com and ESW Associates combine to form a tandem of software offerings that address a broad range of solutions for Microsoft products. Boasting a 14-year track record of success, their industry recognitions and use cases continued rolling in – yet they felt that they were not fully leveraging their growing reputation and online presence to maximize their lead generation potential. Not to mention, their processes had evolved to the point where scalability did not concern them one bit. With these two key factors aligned, they were ready to invest in a true partner to help them expand their client base and offer their best-in-class capabilities to the world.

Also, they had a sense that their accounts had grown stale, and that they were not receiving the type of granular insights and advanced capabilities that would lead to a belief that, at the very least –they were getting anything even close to optimal performance against their investments.

So, they contacted a Google Premier Partner with the skills and industry reputation to help them to get where they wanted to go. That partner was Core and More Technologies.

Challenge

At Core and More Technologies, we first ensure that the most fundamental ingredient to success is accounted for - that being accurate conversion tracking. Unfortunately, that was not the case here. As a matter of fact, a complete rethinking of the entire tracking setup – entailing numerous platforms, would be immediately required.

Also, their account was not aligned to the audiences that they wanted to reach. Their keyword quality scores were disproportionately low, ad copy and landing pages were not entirely relevant to one another, and the bidding strategies that were in place did not seem to be returning the highest possible yield.

In addition to this, there was and never had been a process or practice leading to a system for measuring the actual value of their digital marketing investments; yes, they had a CRM system on the backend helping them to quickly transform digital submissions into actual sales calls, however there was nothing tying the closed revenue back to the original lead sources, or attributing those sources to vetted leads i.e., pipeline.

Solution

First, given the complexities of their setup and the numerous platforms that they were using – we needed to complete a thorough and accurate inventory of their existing conversion tracking system.

In parallel, we sat down with the ESW team to gain a full understanding of their objectives as an organization. This is a standard point of process for us. It enables us to create a digital strategy that is internally consistent on one side, and mutually supportive on the other. It is a fully developed process that we have built and refined over the past 10 years, the details of which we cannot disclose publicly here – or everyone would do the same!

The extent to which we sit down and formulate a well thought out strategy predicts the overall success of the new digital program that we are designing. For this client, the nuances were many. And for any client, these considerations must be handled and the solutions tailored on a case-by-case basis – as there is absolutely no ‘one size fits all’. Middle of the road solutions will garner middle of the pack results.

With the results of this thorough analysis and cumulative mindshare in hand, we reach the execution stage. There was nothing tentative about our approach, and there never is. We laid the groundwork for the new program by first dismantling the technical underpinnings for what we revealed to be a highly inaccurate tracking setup. We created a system that ties first into our source reporting platform, then into Google Analytics, and then out to the various advertising platforms (Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc). By establishing an approach like this, we create an environment whereby we are creating consistency across all channels. This enables us to:

This is how we create genuine transparency and measure return on investment (ROI) in a model that entails only one level of accuracy; and that is 100%. It is also how we build true and lasting partnerships with our clients, and is certainly one of the reasons why we are a Google Premier Partner for 6 consecutive years now.

With that completed, we began the complete overhaul of their advertising accounts. There is only so much we can say about this here, as the methodologies and practices that we have developed over time are truly the differentiator between us and our competitors. Suffice to say that we essentially converted the mindshare that we had established by way of the aforementioned client meetings at the outset to transform their entire account(s) from top to bottom and side to side, leaving no stone unturned.

To complete the picture, we also deployed our entire toolkit of analysis tools which includes Hotjar, Google Optimize, and other platforms. We have found that having this additional layer added into in our various digital programs enables us to create efficiencies that are critical to long-term account success.

Once our campaigns are live, we consider ourselves to have zero runway for error.

“Since Core and More Technologies joined the engagement, the cost per click (CPC) has dropped by 50%, and year-over-year lead volume has increased significantly. The team is communicative, workshopping PPC strategies to figure out the best way forward.”

-Russell Kommer, Chief Executive Officer , ESW Associates and ExcelHelp.com

The Results

At this point, we have nearly six months’ worth of data to compare against the previous period and the prior year.

SEM (Since we renovated the entire account – this is across all platforms vs. the previous period which amounts to a four-month span at this point):

SEM (2020 v. 2019):

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