HR solutions provider, Ciphr, reached out to Common Ground with the goal of decreasing their cost per conversion whilst increasing the number of high-value conversions in the form of demo bookings via their digital marketing activities.

The COVID pandemic forced businesses across the globe to reevaluate their processes, with homeworking becoming a common occurrence. As we saw from our report released earlier this year, there was an increased demand for HR software solutions, like Ciphr, as a result. Flexible working options have remained popular post-pandemic, meaning there was a definite opportunity to capitalise on this continued wave of interest.

The biggest challenge facing Ciphr was the amount of competition within the space. With numerous HR software solutions providers globally and the market growing year on year, being the chosen brand would require a first-rate strategy.

In addition, many brands within the space would likely have a large digital marketing budget. Savviness in where and how to invest Ciphr’s spend would be a crucial factor in making this campaign a success.

Costs per click, for example, can be extremely expensive, so we needed to ensure that we were going to drive high-quality traffic to Ciphr’s site in order to return on that investment.

The majority of businesses have some kind of HR software solution in place, so we had a wide range of areas to target if we had wanted. However, we opted to focus our efforts on specific sectors where Ciphr had most experience (e.g. education, and charities).

Our strategy would need to be built around activities that would get the best results out of these selected areas.

So, what was Common Ground’s tactic for taking on this crowded market?

We began by introducing a new digital ads campaign and assigned goal values. Goal values would provide Google signals on where to prioritise and what to optimise, and also gave us greater measurable insight on the campaign’s success.

Additionally, we brought in a new structure that split campaigns up so that each one targeted one of the key industries that we’d identified. Doing so previously had seen improved cost per conversion rates, and allowed us to increase the budget across all the campaigns, rather than allowing less effective campaigns to eat larger portions of the spend.

The new digital ads benefited from upgraded copy and extensions following current best practices.Making use of all available headline and description space, we employed a variety of calls to action as well as headlines that specifically targeted chosen keywords.

We also utilised Google’s automated bidding strategies to optimise performance, setting it to prioritise high value conversions (demo bookings) in preference to low value conversions (brochure downloads).

The new campaign saw a 30% reduction in cost per conversion compared to figures from the 2022 campaign, with the number of conversions increasing by 246%. In addition, the campaign also saw an 859% increase in high-value conversions – considerably exceeding the original target set by Ciphr.

The number of clicks grew by 666% against 2022 figures , with the click through rate increasing by 353% versus the previous year.

Though the ad spend on Google did increase during the campaign, due to the impressive results being achieved throughout, the client was happy to increase this figure.

All in all, the campaign secured significantly improved results across the full range of metrics – an impressive feat within a highly competitive and growing market.