CEDA

Ceda runs a large PPC account covering more than 20 different services across five clinics in Surrey: West Byfleet, Sunningdale, Farnham, Wokingham and Reigate.

The account had been built up over several years and was no longer configured to work well with modern smart bidding. Each service had its own campaign for each location, with its own budget. This resulted in hundreds of campaigns, each with limited data and small budgets, which held back Google’s ability to learn and made the account difficult to manage.

The campaigns were also keyword-heavy in a way that no longer works well. Traffic was spread so thinly across so many terms that each keyword generated very little data, leaving the bid strategies with weak signals to work from.

On top of this, Ceda was optimising for upper-funnel events such as live chats and inbound calls. They couldn’t optimise the online booking funnel itself because it ran through a third-party platform, Semble, which couldn’t be fully tracked. As a workaround, they optimised for “book online” clicks, which only captured users entering the journey, not those completing it.

Step 1 – Rebuilding conversion data

The first priority was fixing the conversion data.

We worked with Ceda to rebuild the booking journey so more of it sat on their own website, rather than being handed straight off to Semble. Semble was only loaded once a user had selected their service type, age category, location and appointment duration, at which point they were highly engaged and ready to proceed.

This allowed us to track a “Proceed” stage as a new conversion event. We also used Semble’s redirect to send users to a thank-you page after a completed booking, enabling us to track completed bookings as true conversions for the first time.

We defined three conversion events to optimise towards:

• Booking journey initiated
• Proceed (details entered, ready to pay)
• Online booking completed

We then assigned conversion values to each stage based on the likelihood of reaching a completed booking. Online bookings were given 20x the value of a journey initiation. This allowed us to move to a maximise conversion value strategy, so Google could prioritise users most likely to complete a booking rather than just those who clicked the button.

Step 2 – Account consolidation and modernisation

Once conversion tracking was in good shape, we restructured the account to provide clear data signals.

We grouped services into shared portfolio budgets spanning multiple locations, increasing the data flowing into each bid model and reducing fragmentation. We also shifted away from long lists of exact-match keywords towards broader, high-intent coverage supported by improved conversion data, which made this safe to do.

For services that didn’t need location-specific campaigns and shared the same landing pages, we merged them into a single campaign. This brought the campaign count down significantly, made the account easier to manage, and concentrated data into fewer, stronger campaigns.

All changes were rolled out gradually with split tests to protect performance along the way.

Results

In the next six months, performance improved in all areas.

The percentage of users moving through the booking process rose from 63% to 67%, showing that more people were getting further along and giving Google better signals. At its highest point, the account reached 310 online bookings in one month, up from 240 at the beginning.

After 12 months, January’s PPC spend dropped by 26.6% compared to the previous year, going from £21.5k to £15.8k, while bookings stayed the same. Ceda kept the same number of bookings but spent over £5.7k less that month.