Background
Whether trucking across town or across the country, BIG Machine Parts is the chosen supplier of truck drivers for semi-truck parts and accessories. BMP supplies parts from some of the industry’s biggest brands including Kenworth, Volvo, and Freightliner—making them a trusted source when a semi-truck is in need of repair. Their emphasis on high-quality customer service, in addition to their free shipping and returns policy, has made them a favorite in the trucking industry for years.
Key Metrics
80%
of Calls Came from Paid Search
$220,000
Increase in Revenue
60 Million
Impressions
Why’d They Come to LP?
BIG Machine Parts had been using a digital marketing agency to manage their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, but noticed sales were declining. The agency had been running an automated strategy; BMP’s bids and budgets weren’t being managed effectively and their cost-per-clicks (CPCs) were too high. BMP decided it was time to make a change, and partnered with Logical Position (LP) for help with their paid search campaigns. After an initial intake call to discuss BMP’s business goals, it was time for our team to get to work!
What Strategy Was Used?
The difficulty with using an automated strategy for paid search (as BMP’s previous agency did) is that you can only really choose one goal to hit. Automated campaigns are not able to optimize for several goals; this makes it difficult to achieve a good return on investment while also trying to grow sales. BMP’s goal was to scale their business, but the price for using fully automated campaigns was a decline in revenue. Our first order of business was using manual campaigns, which allowed us to optimize for more than one goal: scale AND efficiency. Having a real person looking over the account didn’t hurt, either.
Next, we performed a code and tracking audit on BMP’s ecommerce platform, Shopify. This enabled our team to map out code tracking suggestions and recommend additional plug-ins. We were able to ensure that site visitors were being properly captured and segmented into our remarketing audiences. Alternatively, many of BMP’s sales were happening over the phone—semi-truck parts can be expensive, and most people aren’t comfortable making a large purchase on a website. Truck drivers needed to be sure the accessory they were buying could be configured with their rig. Speaking with a customer service representative is crucial to the purchasing journey. With a clear understanding of BMP’s unique sales process, our team focused on driving phone calls for BMP, and created visibility into these calls through our partnership with CallRail to track sitewide phone calls.
Since so many sales were happening over the phone, measuring the full impact of our ads presented a challenge—but we figured out a solution. Our team got creative with attribution and conversion tracking to increase our visibility and overall impact on the business. We were able to factor in offline sales happening over the phone through CallRail data and Shopify’s ease of reporting. To do this, we used weighted averages of paid search generated phone calls and total phone sales, which we found by going into the backend of BMP’s website, to create hybrid return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) goals and reporting.
As our Google Ads campaigns began to take off, our CPCs became lower, which meant that we were more efficient with the traffic we were generating. Lower CPCs meant savings for BMP, which gave us room in the budget to try something new. BMP began running on Microsoft Advertising, which gave them a whole new audience to target. Customers who use Bing tend to come from an older demographic, and are often B2B focused. Without using Microsoft, BMP would not have reached these customers. Next, we set up BMP with our paid social remarketing campaigns to get their ads on Facebook and Instagram. They also started working with our partner The Good, an ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) company, which helped them convert more website visitors into purchasers.
What Were the Results
As mentioned earlier, phone calls are crucial to BMP’s success, and a big portion of their sales come from these calls. The paid search campaigns that LP is managing account for 80% of the phone calls BMP generates. Even though phone calls are an integral part of BMP’s business, direct sales on the website can have a big impact too. In the last few months, our team has started to optimize the campaigns to focus more on direct site sales—and it shows.
In a year-over-year (YoY) comparison of 2020 versus 2018 (pre-LP), BMP’s revenue is up 48%—a difference of over $220,000. Our ROAS has increased by 16%, and our CPCs are down by 27%. We’ve generated an additional 400,000 clicks and an additional 60 million impressions from paid search. BMP’s brand awareness has increased, too, with new users on the website 65% higher than before they started working with us.
When you’re ready to go BIG, partner with LP!
