Digital Marketing Case Study
Planful Scales Results Through Account Restructure Informed by Comprehensive Google Ads Audit
Planful is the pioneer in financial performance management cloud software. The Planful platform, which helps businesses drive peak financial performance, is used around the globe to streamline business-wide planning, budgeting, consolidations, reporting, and analytics. Planful empowers finance, accounting, and business users to plan confidently, close faster, and report accurately. When Firebrand conducted a comprehensive Google Ads Audit to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of an existing ads account, we uncovered that despite having a strong brand voice and a host of highly produced creative, structural challenges and settings issues prevented the messaging from reaching audiences effectively. In short, the account wasn’t scalable and couldn’t keep pace with the company’s rapid growth. Guided by the Google Ads account audit, Firebrand rebuilt the program from the ground up. By ensuring that everything from MarTech to creative execution aligned with the business goals, we achieved significant improvements, stretching the budget further and allowing Planful to compete with larger rivals.
Key Results
6x lower CPCs than the peer set, resulting in 2.6x more clicks to the Planful website
Longer-lasting budgets — seeing dollars go further meant Planful could reinvest those savings into more competitive, higher-cost terms
Scalable account structure, leading to faster activations, better messaging, and actionable performance insights
Approach
An audience-first account structure aligned the messaging to the keyword and persona targets, allowing for tighter ad groups, testable messaging, and turnkey creative activations.
A user-centric landing page strategy prioritized pages that a user would want to interact with over cold salesy pages. This helps minimize bounce rates in the eyes of the algorithm and ensures potential customers start their journey off on a positive note.
Right-sized targeting and settings allowed us to create the best fit, as what may be best practice for Google might not be the best fit for every advertiser. Narrower targeting can lead to higher Quality Scores, and in turn, stretch budgets further and expand overall reach.
In their words
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