Google Bids Optimised Based on Phone Call-to-Sale Conversion Rates

Shortlisted in 2010 A4u Awards

Introduction

Borro.com is an alternative finance provider in the "online pawnbroking" space. Started in late 2008, it has seen tremendous growth in loans during the recession. As with any lending operation, the most eager customers are not necessarily the best ones to lend to. It is easy to acquire cheap finance loans online, but Borro.com's customers need to furnish real collateral such as jewellery, watches, cars, etc. for Borro to lend against. Also, a significant number of customers apply for a loan by telephone, making traditional search engine marketing difficult to measure.


Solution: Pay-per-Sale Search Engine Marketing

  • Perfect Storm Media has developed a true performance-based system to track Borro.com's inbound leads and telephone calls all the way through to sales. The system optimises bids taking into account the conversion rate of the leads and phone calls into loans.
  • Perfect Storm Media's "round-robin" telephone rotation system places a different keyword on Borro's site for each keyword used to enter the site, so we always know which keyword led to which phone call.
  • Borro then tracks the conversions of those phone calls into sales, and that data is automatically fed into Perfect Storm Media's system. The system then adjusts bids on Google, taking into account the FINAL conversion rate AFTER the phone call arrives. We found that the conversion rate from lead-to-loan varied from under 1% to over 67%!
  • PSM also designed over 300,000 Google ads and managed bids for over 600,000 keywords, taking into account call conversions, and dynamically inserted headline text to maximize conversion.
  • Perfect Storm Media gets paid ONLY when Borro actually makes a loan, and not per-lead nor per-call nor per-click. Perfect Storm Media is taking on all the risk involved, right from click to cash in the customer's bank account.


Results

  • Borro.com's ROI has increased three fold since Perfect Storm's involvement, which nearly dates back to the inception of the company.
  • The volume of loans has more than quadrupled since Perfect Storm's involvement.
  • We worked with Borro's Founder/CEO to use our technology to figure out exactly what the ROI was for various individual keywords and buckets of keywords and to change bids in real time, based on the lead-to-sale conversion data.


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