Audio Ads

Habit Forming

StopBitingNails.com used Google Audio Ads to counter seasonal sales cycles, deliver a significant lift across sales channels, and increase gross sales by 15%.

Chris Henry didn’t find his flagship product; it found him. “I too was a nail biter,” says Chris sheepishly. “Back in the early ‘90s I was working at a natural foods factory. One day, I looked down at my hands and noticed I had nails again. For some reason, I’d stopped biting them.” The reason: the ingredients he worked with left his hands tasting bitter and helped heal his cuticles. Chris knew he was onto something – he just needed to bottle the secret sauce.

Something clicks

In 1999, Chris launched his product, Control It!, and the website StopBitingNails.com. His first order of business was to determine how to best go to market. “With Control It!, I tried everything under the sun and pounded lots of pavement,” Chris recalls. “People loved it, but I was still working two jobs to keep the business running. I needed to get it in front of more people.” Chris looked into online advertising. “Customers would recommend Control It! to friends and they’d go search for it on Google. Online advertising seemed like a place I wanted to be, so I signed up for Google AdWords™.” He immediately noticed an increase in traffic and sales. “Straight away I saw that I’d be able to tell if AdWords worked or not,” says Chris. “Everything clicked – managing my budget with the bidding, the tracking, the keywords. It was my first advertising ‘ah-ha’ moment.” Chris tested different ad copy and targeting to see what variations delivered the best conversion rates. Now he checks his account weekly to make adjustments. “With everything else I have going on, the fact that I can set it and forget it is great. And it allowed me to try out other advertising channels.”

Lending a voice

One of those channels was radio, which reaches 80 percent of the 18-54 year-old population. “I gave it a try a while back, but on the whole it felt like a ‘take my money and run’ kind of set up,” Chris explains. “The negotiations, managing the whole thing, and tracking the results were all huge headaches. It seemed like you had to be an insider to get decent rates. Finally, I basically gave up. For a small business like me, radio was too much work.”

Then Chris heard about Google Audio Ads™. “I’d already put the time in to develop a spot – my brother-in-law had recorded it. The interface was similar to AdWords. I could control my budget, pick the station formats, upload my spot, and target demographics all with a few clicks. And best of all, I could track the campaign to see if it paid off. The whole thing took five minutes to set up.” Chris smiles. “So I decided to see exactly what my brother-in-law’s voice could do.”

On the trail

He targeted his home state of Florida first, and used a number of ways to track the campaigns. “We track through a free shipping code – ‘radio’ – used in the spot, and our cart system is set up to ask where they heard about us. I combined that with the geographic data from Google Analytics™ to get a very good picture of the campaign’s impact.” Google Analytics, a free tool that offers comprehensive analysis of a variety of important site metrics, works with AdWords to track how visitors arrive at and interact with StopBitingNails.com. “I noticed conversions in the first few days, which was very positive, and decided to try a few other markets.”

To determine which markets to target next, Chris analyzed his database and found Washington and Pennsylvania had the highest ratios of population to Control It! sales. Using the same spot, he configured campaigns targeting each state. “Took me about 30 minutes,” he recalls.

By the end of the month, the news was decidedly good. “It blew away my expectations. I earned back 100 percent of my ad spend and sales increased 20 percent. We found about 75 percent of new customers who heard the spot would go directly to our site. The rest would do a Google search and find us. This was my second advertising ‘ah-ha’ moment.” Chris decided to roll out ads in six more states. “It looked like my brother-in-law’s voice was doing the trick.”

Heavy lifting

But some of the data he saw was puzzling. “I noticed a 30 percent sales increase in New Jersey, but I wasn’t running a campaign there,” says Chris. “It turned out that because it was just across the river from Pennsylvania, people were hearing the spot during their commute to work. That really opened my eyes to exactly how powerful radio could be.”

The new campaigns fueled sales by up to 50 percent. “It was then I learned a new term: ‘sales lift.’ We sell through a number of vendors, online and off, and they were starting to report sales increases of 15-20 percent. And this was happening right before the summer season. My sales are very seasonal – or at least they had been – usually receding by 20 percent in the summer. But rather than receding, gross sales have increased 15 percent.”

Best of both worlds

Before using Google Audio Ads, Chris had only invested in acquisition. “But now, I can run an acquisition campaign that doubles as a branding campaign. To a small business owner, branding is advertising dollars that didn’t convert. With Audio Ads, I get the best of both worlds.”

As more and more customers recognize Control It! as a reliable brand, word is spreading even faster and Chris now owns a fully functioning business. He no longer needs to take on part time jobs, has hired two employees, and concentrates on expansion and growth, rather than nail-biting minutiae of survival. “We have an exciting and challenging horizon due to Google Audio Ads,” says Chris. “Combined with AdWords, we’re now on a level playing field with the big guys.”

About Google Audio Ads
Google Audio Ads™ makes radio advertising easy and cost-effective. Google has partnered with hundreds of radio stations that reach millions of listeners throughout the United States. Using the AdWords online interface, advertisers can develop and launch campaigns, and target their audience based on time, location, station type, and demographics. Audio Ads connects them with qualified creative professionals who can help produce ads. Tracking is simplified through online reporting, which features real-time recordings of radio spots in context.

About Google Adwords
Google AdWords­ is a performance-based advertising program that enables businesses large and small to advertise on Google and its network of partner websites. Hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide use AdWords for text, image, and video ads priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-impression (CPM) basis. Built on an auction-based system, AdWords is a highly quantifiable and cost-effective way to reach potential customers. For more information, visit http://adwords.google.com.