Virtual Gurus
How Virtual Gurus stabilized and scaled paid search performance.
Virtual Gurus, one of the signature companies in western Canada’s rapidly growing tech ecosystem, offers a talent marketplace that matches organizations with skilled remote assistants from across North America. The company needed a strategic, technically proficient digital partner to help them break through a performance plateau in the highly competitive paid search space and position the business for its next phase of growth. The results were dramatic: a 1300% increase in leads in less than a year.
The Challenge
While paid search had traditionally been Virtual Gurus’ strongest lead and client acquisition channel, the company’s results had become less predictable over time. Strong performance would be followed by periods of stalled lead generation and higher levels of spam. This plateau posed a serious risk for an organization entering high-growth mode.
Beyond addressing lead generation challenges, the company also wanted to augment its internal technical capabilities with an agency partner and expand its ability to improve paid search ROI as quickly as possible. This was a strategic play, not just a tactical fix.
With Virtual Gurus targeting a bold move to break through its lead gen plateau and trigger its next phase of growth, the company needed a similarly bold partner – one that took a sophisticated approach to consistently translating paid search spend into predictable revenue generation.
Enter clearmotive.
The Solution
The first thing clearmotive did with Virtual Gurus was work to understand the root causes of the uneven paid search performance. The team performed a thorough audit and analysis to understand the issues.
One critical insight: the data configurations had become too cluttered to be effective. clearmotive streamlined the technical tracking configurations, cutting multiple conversion points down to just two. This allowed clearmotive and Virtual Gurus to identify and focus on what truly influenced conversions, leads and, ultimately, revenue.
This streamlining is especially critical given how paid search works at a technical level.
“Paid media is powered by machine learning,” said Jake Surrey, Director of Digital at clearmotive. “You have to give it the right data for it to optimize what you want to see. If you're giving it 50 different things that you could optimize for, there’s no way that even the best algorithm in the world will know what to do with that.
”By fixing the tracking setup and increasing the signal-to-noise ratio in the resulting data, clearmotive enabled Virtual Gurus to get better insights into their lead quality and performance. Whether something was working or it wasn’t, the company would now have a far better idea of what to change to drive predictable, quality results.
On the back of these changes, clearmotive was also able to further help the Virtual Gurus team optimize conversion rates by making recommending changes to websites and landing pages. The team also made changes to campaign structure, keyword selection and performed worked with the Virtual Gurus team on ongoing ad copy testing to help push ongoing incremental improvement.
This key structural work enabled the clearmotive approach to digital marketing: build an engine that enables you to make investments (not just spending) that deliver revenue (not just leads).
“We've developed a more refined, consistent, predictable baseline in our partnership with Virtual Gurus where the range of outcomes is much, much narrower than it used to be. We now know that if we spend this much more on search, there will be better business results that follow,” said Surrey. “That’s what we’re all about.”
The Results
In the end, at clearmotive we believe marketing results are about what matters to our clients.
And so their words speak the loudest:
“Our work with clearmotive isn’t just about fixing what already existed, but building a stronger foundation for growth in this space,” said Laszlo. “We’ve done that together.”
“We got to a really good place, performance-wise after clearmotive came on board to support us. We don’t have wild fluctuations. We started hitting the goals that we had set up for cost-per-lead and the overall number of leads we wanted to see.”
The numbers bear this out. The Virtual Gurus and clearmotive partnership has dramatically improved the number and quality of leads produced via paid search with a 1300% increase in leads in less than a year.
As Virtual Gurus introduces new products to the market and scales up its investments in paid media, they now have a best-in-class account set up and structure and are able to scale the channel effectively and efficiently.
We worked on giving Virtual Gurus a foundation they can build on confidently. When you have clean, actionable insights, every marketing dollar works harder and every decision gets sharper.
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