Protected: Payroll Centre
Dominating a niche with paid search and social ads, resulting in 9.36 times ROI
Project Summary
The Payroll Centre, a leading provider of online payroll training courses and qualifications in the UK, partnered with Hewitt Matthews to get in front of more potential learners. After two years of continued work together, The Payroll Centre is looking to take its PPC to even higher heights, continuing to increase investment in paid search, after experiencing consistent growth and achieving a remarkable 9.36x return on investment (ROI).
How we did it
Protected: Payroll Centre | Paid Search | Paid Social
The Challenge
The Payroll Centre, the biggest payroll training company in the UK, started with a modest budget and faced challenges due to the nature of their niche market. With low search volume for payroll training courses, there were relatively few opportunities for visibility online and they needed to compete with more well-known rivals in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The Solution
We developed a strategy that not only built dominance for high-intent search terms but also reached their target audience across multiple platforms, including driving new demand from those not actively searching/aware of payroll courses yet.
- Brand Search Campaigns: We launched a targeted brand search campaign to ensure The Payroll Centre dominated the SERPs for their name, shutting out competitors who were also bidding on the brand name. By appearing in both paid and organic results they occupied more space above the fold and were able to easily control the messaging in the paid ad.
- Performance Max: To counteract low search volume and expand their reach, we introduced Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. These campaigns extended the reach of ads across YouTube, Gmail, display, and Google’s audience network, targeting potential customers even when they weren’t yet actively searching for payroll courses and building new demand.
- LinkedIn Ads: Considering the professional nature of the target audience, we introduced LinkedIn Ads to target professionals looking to upskill in payroll. This platform improved lead generation and further boosted brand awareness among the right demographics. We delivered highly tailored ads to the right people at the right time, maximising The Payroll Centre’s visibility which is driving efficient conversions.
The Results
Over the past two years, The Payroll Centre has experienced consistent and impressive growth:
- 9.36 ROI: For every £1 spent on ads, The Payroll Centre has generated £9.36 in revenue.
- Increased visibility: The brand search campaign ensured that they covered more space in the SERPs and increased Impression Share for key terms, occupying both paid and organic spaces to push competitors down.
- Conversion growth: Crucially, the combination of PMAX and LinkedIn Ads enabled us to deploy more accurate targeting & retargeting which significantly boosted brand awareness, overall website traffic, and overall conversions.
Despite a modest budget, The Payroll Centre has successfully positioned itself as a leader in the paid space for payroll training courses, achieving almost 10 times their return on ad spend and consistently outperforming competitors.
Next steps
Looking ahead, The Payroll Centre aims to capitalise on their success by investing more in PPC to continue to drive more exponential growth. We have a number of ideas to layer on the existing strategy to deepen the segmentation to reach new customers and strategic upselling to existing customers.
