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Case Study: Lincoln Barbershop — How to Reduce Conversion Costs by 40%

12.07.2021 | Usability, Contextual Advertising

Dmytro Romanovskyi, Director and Founder of the internet marketing agency Destra

The story of the first two months of cooperation between the men’s barbershop Lincoln Barbershop and the marketing agency Destra.link.

The barbershop owner approached us with a request to reconfigure and further manage contextual advertising for an already existing business. Competition in the city was high, making the efficiency of every lead generation channel crucial.

Client: Lincoln Barbershop

Lincoln Barbershop is a salon offering a full range of men’s haircuts and massage services.

The owner was satisfied with the number of conversions on the website but not with the advertising campaign costs. He approached us to identify where the budget was being spent inefficiently and to optimize those areas.

Client’s Goal

Reconfigure contextual advertising in order to:

reduce the cost of acquiring a lead and increase the landing page conversion rate,
lower overall advertising expenses.

Project Tasks:
Lincoln Barbershop

Work Plan

For the first stage, we selected a proven, repeatedly tested scheme for reconfiguring an ad campaign:

audit of contextual advertising performance and the website,
improvements based on audit results,
testing.

If the testing was successful, the updated ad campaign would then be launched.

02

01

We disabled location-based advertising (Smart Local Company). After further research and testing of other groups, the geolocation campaign will be re-enabled.

Search queries were divided into three groups:

General (barbershop Kharkiv, men’s haircut Kharkiv, men’s hair salon Kharkiv, beard trim Kharkiv)
Branded (Lincoln Barbershop, barbershop Lincoln, Lincoln barber, Lincoln beard trim, Lincoln massage)
Competitor-based (search queries including the names of other barbershops in the city)

The audit of ad settings revealed that keywords had been split by match types and groups, which resulted in a loss of control over several important factors. For example, it was difficult to evaluate the cost of acquiring a lead for a specific query or by geolocation.

After analyzing the Google Ads setup, we made adjustments in two key areas:

3

2

1

At this stage, after reviewing the site’s visual and textual content, we suggested the client introduce a loyalty program:

30% discount on all barber services within 3 days before and after a client’s birthday
“Bring a friend and get a 100 UAH discount” offer
Introduction of a “Gift Certificate” service

All three proposals were approved by the client.

Preparation for the ad campaign was carried out in three stages:

We reduced the size of the pricing block, combining the view of two pages into a single scroll.

After coordinating with the client, we updated the menu by adding “Promotions” banners, which included the birthday discount, the “Cheaper Together” offer, and the “Gift Certificate.”

Preparing the Landing Page for the Ad Relaunch

We aligned the different language versions of the website (before the update, the Russian, Ukrainian, and English versions differed in both visuals and content).

We didn’t carry out a major redesign in order to preserve the existing traffic and maintain the loyalty of current clients.

After reconfiguring the ads and making parallel landing page updates, we launched campaign testing.

We believe an effective landing page is one that generates targeted leads. This is a more accurate measure of effectiveness than simply counting the total number of leads, since high volume doesn’t mean much if they’re not qualified.

Test runs over the course of a month showed that competitor-targeted ads were ineffective, consuming 40% of the ad budget. As a result, the Destra team decided to disable this group. The freed-up resources were proposed for launching a campaign for the barbershop’s massage services — an idea that was approved.

The adjustments delivered strong testing results. We achieved our goal: ad costs for the barbershop were reduced, resources were redirected to promote an additional service, and as a pleasant bonus, the landing pages became more conversion-focused.

Landing Page Testing

Since the ad campaigns had initially been set up incorrectly, with queries mixed across groups, the cost per lead decreased only slightly. After combining all competitor-related queries into a separate campaign, the cost of acquiring a new client in this group exceeded 2000 UAH. As a result, this campaign was disabled after the first month of testing, which significantly reduced overall advertising expenses.

Most people already know where they want to get a haircut, so they search for a barbershop by name — these are branded queries. New clients who haven’t chosen a salon yet — perhaps newcomers to the city, or those looking to upgrade from a regular hair salon to a barbershop — fall under general queries. Attempts to lure clients away from other barbershops are competitor queries.

But every new client for us is someone else’s former client. Convincing people to leave their barber for a new one is a very difficult and costly process, making it completely unprofitable. That’s why we decided not to pursue this approach and disabled the competitor-targeting ad group.

Conclusions

Results of Ad Optimization for Lincoln Barbershop (One Month)

We’re pleased to have achieved such results after just one round of testing. We anticipate further improvement across all key metrics with the introduction of the geolocation group. We also plan to set up social media ads targeting users who have already submitted requests on the website.

This is not the end, but only the beginning of a successful partnership between Destra.link marketing agency and Lincoln Barbershop.

We were pleased with both the outcomes and the fact that new ideas emerged for further improving the landing page and fine-tuning ad parameters to boost lead generation efficiency.

Key results from the first month:

General queries delivered a 16% conversion rate
Branded queries achieved an 84% conversion rate
19% of clients took advantage of the new “Birthday Discount” promotion, increasing brand loyalty

After disabling the competitor-targeting group, the cost per lead dropped by 40% within a month.

Both we and the client were satisfied with these results. The freed-up budget was redirected toward a new ad campaign promoting the massage services.

Want to see a similar success story for your business? Leave a request on our website. You’ll learn all the details of working with Destra.link and how we can build a profitable ad campaign tailored to your company.