THE SCENARIO

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Historically, Pri-Med focused heavily on in-person conferences. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company pivoted in 2020 to a more online-centric model and created its new flagship product: a monthly virtual conference PrimaryCareNOW. As this and other Pri-Med products evolved, we had to collectively rethink the search engine marketing strategy. This included reprioritizing our online-focused keyword set across paid search and SEO. Roughly two years later, as Pri-Med’s virtual products continued to gain momentum in the market, we focused on maximizing visibility across several high priority keyword themes so we could capitalize on primary care clinician’s growing interest in earning their continuing medical education (CME) credits online.

 

THE ACTION PLAN

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Synapse identified the largest spikes in demand for online CME credits, particularly among specific roles (doctors, nurse practitioners, etc.) and topic areas (pharmacology, pain management, etc.). This insight was used to SEO-optimize relevant, existing website content and identify content gaps. These gaps were filled with original, high-quality content developed by a medical writer, leading to significant gains in both SEO traffic and qualified SEO leads.

For paid search, existing budgets were reprioritized, and additional budget was secured with the Pri-Med marketing team to fully support the increase in online CME demand. Back-end data was used to perform extensive theme-level analyses to ensure lead quality remained strong as the program expanded; in fact, the qualified lead rate slightly increased year-over-year (YoY), from 83% in 2021 to 86% in 2022. Additionally, the Synapse team has been working closely with Pri-Med to ensure their in-person conferences, which have gained significant traction in 2022, are successfully supported by our digital marketing efforts. As a result, we have regularly met or exceeded registration goals for the in-person conferences while generating an efficient cost-per-registration.

 

THE RESULTS

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The integrated performance marketing strategy led to significant increases in traffic and, more importantly, qualified leads. The SEO program generated 71%more qualified leads YoY, while the paid search program generated 31% more qualified leads YoY, as well as 41% more non-brand users.Expectations are even higher for 2023, with plans to grow both the online and in-person programs even further.Our teams are looking forward to the challenge!

THE SCENARIO

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Goodwin University relies on their website presence as their primary means of prospective student lead generation and recruited Synapse SEM to build, launch and manage an SEO strategy in 2015. After working with an existing paid search agency for several years, Goodwin also transitioned their Google Ads and Bing Ads management to Synapse SEM in the fourth quarter of 2018. Synapse and Goodwin have since been partnered on the SEM/SEO channels, consistently reaching higher inquiry levels each year, despite largely flat marketing budgets. Following consecutive years in 2022 and 2023 of +50% YoY growth in SEM lead volume, paid search budgets were increased a substantial 25% year over year in 2024.Synapse was tasked with managing those budgets to continue the momentum in inquiry growth and avoid CPC inflation and other diminishing marginal returns on investment.

THE ACTION PLAN

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With increased budgets now available, Synapse uncapped Goodwin’s most productive keyword sets to maximize impression share on top-converting themes. We also carefully tested network expansion with new Performance Max campaigns to increase exposure into additional Google properties like YouTube, Display and Gmail. We collaborated with Goodwin’s marketing team to develop new program-level guides for potential students—a softer CTA that could be used on landing pages for students not yet ready to speak with admissions staff members. We also executed a full-scale Quality Score improvement strategy including RSA, ad extension and landing page copy overhauls. Our goal was to improve Quality Scores to mitigate CPC increases that had hindered the effectiveness of past SEM budget increases. Finally, we also began importing deeper-funnel conversion data like qualified applications and enrollments into Google Ads from GU’s student management system.This allowed us to test deeper-funnel bidding models with a focus on lead quality rather than quantity.

 

THE RESULTS

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Our budget expansion strategy was highly successful in FY24 with a 38% year over year increase in SEM leads—an increase that exceeded the roughly 25%increase in fiscal year budgets. The push to include secondary CTAs on landing pages with content guides proved highly successful—adding 417 incremental conversions throughout the year. Our Quality Score improvement strategy yielded an 11% YoY improvement, which helped us decrease CPCs by 18% year over year, despite Google reporting 15% YoY inflation in CPCs for the higher education industry. Deeper-funnel bidding strategies also significantly improved lead quality, and in our high priority Nursing campaign, qualified applicants increased 133% year over year.Uni

THE SCENARIO

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Buildium has historically invested in a comprehensive set of keyword themes in an effort to maximize sales volume as well as marketing qualified lead (MQL) volume. However, back-end sales volume, MQL to sale rate, and overall efficiency varied significantly by theme, regardless of each theme’s ability to drive strong MQL volume. This indicated lead quality was inconsistent across keyword themes. Synapse and Buildium collaborated to evaluate the potential impact of more aggressively investing in top sales-producing themes and reducing investment in themes producing less qualified MQLs. This evaluation included supporting tactics to maximize the results of these top-performing themes.

THE ACTION PLAN

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Synapse worked closely with Buildium to invest more heavily in its top sales producing themes, both by capturing more impression share, but also by implementing several initiatives to generate stronger results within those themes. These supporting tactics included a complete restructure to maximize Quality Score and have full control over our budget allocation and flighting, regular landing page testing to evaluate various CTAs and layouts, testing automatic bid strategies, and filtering out unqualified traffic with more aggressive negative keyword research and expansion. Increasing our investment in top performing themes, and then optimizing these themes with high-impact changes, had a profound affect on overall program performance.

THE RESULTS

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By prioritizing investment based on back-end MQL and sales data (including completely restructuring the campaigns to ensure full control over our media budget allocation and flighting, and deploying on-going landing page testing), we were able to not only increase sales by 117% YoY, but also increase MQL volume by 59% YoY and decrease cost/MQL by 22% YoY. We also were able to increase traffic 26% YoY on our top performing themes while minimizing the impact on cost-per-click (+8% YoY).