Beamable is a Boston-based company that serves video game makers developing games on the popular Unity platform. By installing Beamable with just one line of code into Unity, a full stack of live ops features and pre-fabs become available for things like tournaments, leaderboards, social messaging, and in-game economies, allowing the game maker to create engaging game content in a fraction of the time.
As a fledgling company, Google Ads are a primary driver of Beamable’s brand awareness. They’d seen success through Google Ads and were eager to continue their growth trajectory, but realized they didn't have the team in place to scale the way they needed to on the platform to realize true growth. Since we were already working with Beamable to build elements of their digital foundations, it was a natural fit to augment our work together with paid ad services. Beamable agreed to our recommendation that we immediately double their campaign spend to a $300/day budget to try and double their leads. However, meeting their ambitious growth goals wasn’t quite as simple as spending more money on Google.
Project Overview
Goal: Generate leads through new Google paid ad campaigns
Services: Paid Media — Consultation, past campaign analysis, new campaign testing, and campaign optimization
Timeline: 60 Days
The Challenge
While Beamable had seed success with paid media, they hadn't accumulated enough data to allow us to confidently pinpoint the specific parts of the strategies and active campaigns that had led to the success. Without enough historical data in place and an aggressive goal to double their lead count through paid channels, we had to proceed by balancing efficiency with experimentation. Essentially, we wanted to test new strategies to generate growth while simultaneously reducing spending where it was inefficient.
The Solution
Our team consulted with the client about putting the breaks on ad spend and instead begin with analyzing past ad performance. That way, we could identify what worked prior and also test new campaigns to support our ad efforts with data.
By presenting our methodology and gaining trust, Beamable saw the value in slowing down and relinquished some control over the ad campaign setup. Our three-step process consisted of:
- Step 1: Identifying areas of improvement. Looking back on available data, we identified performance holes throughout all of the campaign pieces, like the lack of supportive content on landing pages that sabotage campaigns.
- Step 2: Optimizing existing campaigns. We kept some of the current campaigns but improved the framework to increase CTR (+39.86%) and Overall Impression Share (+3%) while decreasing Bounce Rate (-1.24%) and Cost Per Conversion (-9.28%).
- Step 3: Testing new campaigns. Our team then tested various new ad strategies, including campaigns for Brand, RET, and a General Search.
The Results
Our client could see the “why” behind certain adjustments through our consistent coaching.
For example, we noticed that five keywords contributed to nearly 90% of the conversions coming through a Unity-focused campaign in the last 60 days. We took the top five converting target keywords in the Unity campaign and raised them to page one bids.
After monitoring the performance and ensuring that the growth matched a clear decrease in spending, we confidently found a growth strategy that saved Beamable on promotional costs, which led to the best quarter the Beamable team had experienced up to that point:
- CTR (+39.86%)
- Overall Impression Share (+3%)
- Bounce Rate (-1.24%)
- Cost Per Conversion (-9.28%)
Moving forward, there was little to no question about our tactics and strategies. It was a huge win-win for us all — Beamable got an effective ad strategy to implement from this point on, and we won the trust of a valuable client. If paid media campaigns are a focus of your marketing strategies for this quarter, contact our team of experts to help support you!