The Company
WarmFloors is an online retailer of electric under-floor heating systems. Founded in 2004, all of WarmFloors' products are sourced in Scandinavia and offer a more energy-efficient alternative to traditional heating systems. They offer everything from off-the-shelf products to fully installed heating systems. From a standing start in 2004, Warmfloors now has four full-time staff members, and with a turnover of £500,000 in 2006, it is clear that AdWords has played a key role in this growth.
The Challenges
2004 was a tough year for Russel Zera. He had just set up a business in an industry where he had no experience, no training and most worryingly, no customers. From his West Yorkshire base, he and his partner set about learning their market and gaining a foothold in online retailing. Climbing a steep learning curve of the Internet and Google AdWords, Zera has since carved out a healthy online presence that is the core of Warmfloors' success.
On the growing pains of the company, Zera says, "we gave it about a month or two, then we started with Google AdWords. That started driving traffic to the website during the first year; off the back of that we began to grow the business." With such an innovative product, Warmfloors' early focus was to build their brand and catch potential customers' eyes – "We had no trade customers or anything at the time, so early on we just wanted to get exposure and to say 'here we are, we've started up.'"
Results
What separated AdWords from its competitors was the return on investment. Having tried other online programmes, Zera established that others' "return on investment wasn't good enough and the leads just weren't as qualified as they are with Google."
Over time Zera began to tailor his campaigns to optimise for relevance ensuring that only the most qualified leads were arriving at his site. When asked what his primary goal is nowadays, his answer is immediate: "To eradicate any random wasted clicks." With highly targeted traffic as his goal, Zera has concentrated on his keywords to ensure the quality of his leads – a level of targeting other alternative media channels cannot offer.
AdWords Campaign Management allowed Zera to understand which keywords were performing best. Furthermore he used AdWords unique keyword matching options to gain even greater control over when his ad appeared. Zera explains the techniques that have worked for him: "over time I've entered a lot of negative keywords. The keywords for our product are pretty limited really so I put exact matches on them. This lowered our cost-per-click and helped generate more qualified leads, with a conversion rate of over 30% on some campaigns. So now the return [on investment] is better than ever because we get such educated customers through AdWords."