Farm machinery supplier boosts interest in tractors after campaign tune-up

One of Oregonian Media Group’s (OMG) clients sells outdoor power equipment such as tractors, saws, tree removal equipment, and mowers. They have a store in Gresham, Oregon, just east of Portland.

OMG has been helping the store with its search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search for several years. Recently, the client voiced an interest in more tractor sales. Account Manager Jordan Land rolled up his sleeves and turbocharged the campaign in this new direction, boosting calls and website conversions each month.

This client was benefiting from a complete campaign – beyond the good visibility and fast response of paid search, SEO provides the website with long-lasting search visibility and re-messaging reminds people to come back after they visit the website.

Challenge. But in November, when the client had a new campaign objective – more tractor inquiries and phone calls – OMG digital experts had a few ideas to help them get there.

Strategy. Land shifted the paid search budget spend in the campaign so that the focus was on the tractor sales portion of their campaign. He also changed geographically modified keywords to better focus keywords on desired searches, refreshed ad copy, and added a segment focusing on generators. Land completed the changes about mid-November.

Result. Within a week of the Paid Search campaign changes, there was a rise in impression share (a measure of the opportunity to be seen as a search result). This improvement meant that the client’s website was showing as a search result a higher percentage of the time (75%, up from 67%) when an appropriate search was done, especially for “tractor” terms.

Even better, there has been a 10% increase in phone call clicks year over year and Land expects that trend to continue. Looking at the same time period, the click-through rate improved from 5.02% to 6.83%.

Paid search visitors looked at 10% more pages and stayed on the website an average of 36% longer year over year. More than 8% of the time, visitors from the SEM campaign viewed inventory pages, which shows they had real interest in the tractors and other farm equipment featured on the site.

Visits to the site from the “tractors” paid search terms were up more than a third year over year, and these visitors spent a third more time on the website. Inventory was viewed 14% of the time – 50% more than all website visitors.