Budget Increase Case Study

This post is a case study in which a bar association lawyer referral program increased its monthly Google AdWords budget from $500 per month to $1,500 per month, showing that when we could be a little more aggressive in the bidding, almost every category of account performance, including average cost-per-click, significantly improved.

Below is a comparison of six months of data from June 1st, 2010 through November 30th, 2010 (when the lawyer referral program was spending $1,500 per month) and the same period for 2009 (when the lawyer referral program was spending $500 per month).

As this chart shows, the program’s AdWords overall account performance improved in almost every category due to the increased spend, despite overall click prices increasing in the program’s local market from 2009 to 2010. 

This improved overall performance was because we were able to increase the lawyer referral program’s bids slightly, improving its account’s average position (from 3.3 to 3.0) which in turn resulted in a higher clickthrough rate (1.09% to 1.4%), leading to a lower average cost per click ($3.29 to $2.93) despite our more aggressive bids.

Another interesting point is that by increasing the program’s budget by 300%, its conversions increased by more than 300%.