iUniverse

iUniverse: Moving From In-House Management to Hanapin Marketing Spells Success for PPC

As a company offering independent publishing solutions, it's not surprising that iUniverse likes to take care of business on their own. That's just what they did with their PPC accounts - set a budget, set their keywords, and let PPC start working for them. Problem was that for most companies, there is only a limited amount of success you can achieve with a "set it and forget it" strategy with PPC. Research, constant review and analysis, and revision of strategy are the best tactics to continue to build success with PPC. When iUniverse saw that their progress was stalled, they sought out Hanapin Marketing to kick start the accounts and get things moving in the right direction again.

On their own, iUniverse's monthly PPC spend was predetermined and set, and it remained relatively stable for the months they managed the account in-house. Their cost-per-lead (CPL) was high for their industry and fluctuated only minimally, with no real strategy in place to reduce the CPL. The leads per month stayed about the same and every metric you looked at showed that iUniverse was not making any progress. The reason: it takes a great deal of time and experience to build and grow and new PPC campaign and this innovative young company was growing so fast they just didn't have time to devote to PPC. It happens a lot with successful new businesses and, like many others, iUniverse came to Hanapin Marketing for help getting their PPC back on track and growing as fast as their business. Hanapin's professional team specializes in transitioning accounts so the task was nothing new. They immediately started the process of evaluation so that iUniverse and Hanapin could get things back on track and set goals for the account. In their evaluation, Hanapin saw two things that needed to change: monthly spend and CPL. These needed to be reduced drastically while things like clicks and conversions needed to increase.

Hanapin proved to iUniverse that going from "set it and forget it" to professionally managed PPC can produce some memorable results:

Hanapin's first goal with iUniverse was to reduce their monthly spend, which previously was just set and spent, regardless of results or improvement. The Hanapin team saw potential to do more with a lot less and focused on maximizing every dollar spent. To prove that it was possible to reduce spend and still get better results, Hanapin worked to reduce costs by over 34% in just the first month of managing the account, and at the same time increased clicks by over 270% and decreased CPL almost 20%. All in just one month.
Since taking over iUniverse's PPC account, Hanapin Marketing has dropped the CPL over 36% from iUniverse's average CPL when managed in-house. At the same time, in these few short months Hanapin increased leads over 25%, increased impressions 59% and decreased cost-per-click (CPC) 27%. iUniverse has seen very quickly what active, professional management can do for PPC campaigns.
Hanapin's team works diligently every month to keep up the momentum for iUniverse - proving that this isn't just a sudden surge, it's sustainable growth. In the most recent month, iUniverse was able to continue their growth with a 20% increase in leads, and 27% increase in conversion rate, month over month. And, the Hanapin team sees great potential to continue this growth with the proper attention and management.

"When you take a "set it and forget it" approach to your PPC account, it can be easy to see numbers staying the same and think your account is stable and doing fine. The truth is when the numbers stand still, there is work that needs to be done. With iUniverse, we came into the project ready to take an active role, set goals, and work to improve results drastically. We saw a big opportunity to decrease costs while increasing leads generated, and in just a few short months we've exceeded these goals - and we just keep striving for better."

Joe Kerschbaum, Senior Search Marketing Consultant