Founded in 2010, Ontario Virtual School (OVS) is an online school offering Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD) high school online courses. OVS is inspected by the Ontario Ministry of Education and is permitted to grant OSSD credits to students in Canada and internationally. They are an online virtual high school with over 9,000 students and offer over 100 high school courses.
The Issue
OTS was looking to increase overall sales from their e-commerce site. Although that had a solid online presence for generic industry terms and keywords; in order to take the campaign to the next level, they needed to own the buying funnel, layer in additional micro-conversion tracking, and build a stronger display and remarketing presence for their brand.
OVS was looking for a strategy to capitalize on market share while maintaining a positive ROI.
The Goals
Implement proper tracking (e-commerce, calls, chats, contact forms)
Increase market share for course code-specific searches
Remarketing presence
Increase monthly budget by 200%+
Maintain ROAS (return on ad spend) above 5:1
Improve reporting
The Approach
Campaign Segmentation
Segmenting campaigns by search intent allowed us to allocate and scale budget more effectively based on the different conversion rates and potential ROAS:
Bid Strategies
Considering OVS wanted to maintain ROAS while increasing their investment, implementing the right bid strategies was essential to scale this account.
Using a combination of target ROAS and Maximize Conversions bid strategies allowed us to gradually increase budget while maintaining efficiency.
Ad Extensions
Due to the fact they offer 100+ courses, including Ad Extensions was essential to educate users and ultimately increase conversion rates.
- Best-selling courses were highlighted through Structured Snippet extensions for generic searches
- Including Price extensions for course-specific searches gave the most accurate value for each course
Conversion Tracking
Incorporated a robust conversion tracking solution to effectively optimize Ads campaigns based on where they were in the buying funnel.
- Micro-conversions did not produce an immediate purchase, but definitely guided users into making one
- Contact form submissions / Calls / Chats - E-Commerce tracking
- Due to the number of interactions a user makes before purchasing, using a Position-Based Attribution model for transactions vs. Last Click allowed us to improve conversion tracking
Remarketing
OVS’s typical customers (60%) take 2 to 12+ interactions (visits to the website) in more than one day before making a purchase. Having a Remarketing presence was key in increasing volume of returning visitors.
Reporting
SearchKings created a custom e-commerce reporting dashboard that actually meant something to OVS.
- Dividing overall website gross numbers vs. PPC numbers
- Segmenting performance by campaign name, campaign, and network type
- Performance by course (best selling)
- Performance by channel (Google vs Microsoft)
