How the 2013 Pinnacle Award for the Interactive/Mobile category was won.

Like most large businesses today, Carestream’s budgets and resources are allocated across multiple departments. For those of you who don’t know, Carestream is a global provider of diagnostic image equipment and healthcare information solutions. In English? …They provide X-rays for the digital age and the technology that makes it easier for radiologists and healthcare professionals to view, share, and archive those images.

Even though paid search has historically been a very effective tool in driving qualified prospects to the Carestream website, we were faced with the problem of declining budgets and increased competitive paid search activity. These implications coupled together forced us to re-evaluate the structure of the campaign.

But how to do more with less? … The million dollar question!

So we asked ourselves:

• How do we get more results with fewer resources?
• How do we increase click through rates with limited resources?
• How do we decrease cost-per-click?
• How to get the best quality audience to visit Carestream.com?

You might normally answer by saying, ‘with a few more dollars…’ or ‘by redistributing funds…’ However those options weren’t feasible. Instead, we started out by looking at our own best practices, as an agency, based upon past account successes and Google best practices.

• At a high level, we knew that we needed to overcome organizational boundaries. We needed Carestream’s many niche audiences to look at the company as a whole. By combining different departmental budgets, we were best able to best maximize the traffic to the website.
• We reorganized the campaign structure to mirror the website. Doing this also allowed us to identify opportunities to optimize keywords, ad copy, and landing pages.
• One of our greatest considerations for the campaign was ensuring relevancy. We identified which landing pages would be most relevant to the theme of the keywords and new ones were created in order to increase quality scores, ad position and ad rank.
• Studies show that more than 50% of all clicks are to the number one position on a search results page[1]. As such, our goal was to display our ads within the first three positions.

The Results

Over a two year period, from 2010-2012, we increased click volume by 43% and click-thru-rate by 96.77%. We were able to decrease cost-per-click by 59% with an average of $1.34, below industry standards of $1.40[2]  and proving the relevancy of the campaign to the audience.  Paid search is an ever evolving tactic. What works in one ad group won’t necessarily translate in another. With consistent learnings, optimization and monitoring, we were able to show that we can do more with less.