With over 30 niche-dating sites around the globe, Cupid Media found itself running hundreds of AdWords accounts and thousands of campaigns across multiple markets. After merging these campaigns through the enhanced campaigns process, the team reduced campaign management time by 25 hours per week. It was also able to lower its CPA for display campaigns by 7% in just one month.
Goals
Consolidate the number of AdWords campaigns
Improve overall advertising efforts on mobile devices
Reduce time spent managing AdWords accounts
Approach
Restructured AdWords account
Upgraded to enhanced campaigns
Results
Reduced AdWords search accounts by 25%
Reduced AdWords management time by 25 hours per week
Reduced CPA for a display campaign by 7% in one month
Founded in 2000 on Australia's Gold Coast, Cupid Media is a leading digital media and internet information services company. The company owns and operates over 30 niche dating websites with over 30 million members across North and South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East. The company is passionate about helping singles find their perfect match based on their preferences for ethnicity, religion, lifestyle, special interests, and more.
It's complicated
Cupid Media has been using AdWords since 2002. As the company has grown, so has the number of AdWords accounts and campaigns that it manages. Due to the number of dating websites Cupid Media runs, the company found itself with hundreds of AdWords accounts and over 25,000 campaigns targeting multiple international markets in 20 different languages. To further complicate matters, Cupid Media also ran mobile campaigns in separate mobile accounts in order to accurately measure and attribute spend in different markets.
The marketing managers at Cupid Media had a number of ideas on how they would improve the company's online advertising efforts, but felt they lacked the time to implement them across all campaigns and accounts. For example, Cupid Media wanted to run mobile ads globally, but had only created mobile campaigns in a few key markets and languages thus far. The team also wanted to experiment with new Google Display Network (GDN) features such as audience and category targeting. However, since the team's current AdWords campaign management took over 140 hours a week, all of this seemed out of reach.
The upgrade to enhanced campaigns helped us merge multiple device accounts and run one streamlined campaign per market. This has made our AdWords accounts much easier to manage. Enhanced campaigns has also made it easier to analyse and compare performance across different devices.
Upgrading to enhanced campaigns
Cupid Media had heard of enhanced campaigns and knew they were designed for today's multi-screen world, offering the ability to manage bids across devices, locations, and times of day, all from a single campaign. This concept was very appealing to Cupid Media given the sheer number of accounts and campaigns under its management. Seeing the potential to reduce the time the team spent in AdWords, the company decided to upgrade and did so in April 2013. As part of the upgrade process, Cupid Media's marketers started consolidating accounts and merging related campaigns.
Clear results
The results that Cupid Media saw were immediate. By merging campaigns through the enhanced campaigns upgrade process, Cupid Media was able to decrease the number of AdWords accounts the company manages by 25%.
Overall, this simplified structure also allowed the team to reduce AdWords campaign management time by 25 hours a week—a significant amount of time that it was then able to reinvest into driving the performance of the business.
The marketing team now uses some of this extra time to analyse and optimise the performance of its current Adwords campaigns. In one specific display campaign promoting the company's FilipinoCupid site, the team noticed that the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) in some U.S. states was double or triple that of better-performing regions. Using these insights, the team was able to use location bid adjustments to reduce CPA for the campaign by 7% in just one month. This strategy is now being rolled out to more of the company's display campaigns.
Cupid Media's marketers use the rest of their newfound free time to explore new display targeting options such as demographic and interest category targeting. While they don't have any conclusive results on their experiments yet, they are thrilled to be able to test new features, a strategy they are confident will drive improved return on their marketing investment.
