Case Study: Online Tracking for a Local Deck Contractor
Every business has an avatar. It’s their ideal customer. That digital picture may include age, gender, race, ethnic background, income level, or really any other characteristic. If you think about a tool like Facebook, companies advertise based on every single detail someone places in their profile.
As a start-up I believe it’s important for us to get testimonials under our belt so people see what we can do and it makes it easier to acquire future customers. I see free case studies as a great way to get some of that experience under our belt, which is why I bring you our first ever case study with a local deck restoration contractor, Albany Deck Builders. After talking to the owner, I learned that ADB has been around for a long time, but never focused on their online presence until recently. Up to 2020, they didn’t even have a website! But now they do and they’ve asked for our help.
Our first course of action was to review the backend of the website: https://www.deckbuildersalbanyny.com. In a very brief review, we noticed that use of zero tracking tools or visitor counting mechanisms. The only thing the website had was a drag and drop page builder called Elementor. Our 2nd step was to get the goal from them. Their goal was to target deck repair and restoration customers in Albany, New York and any of the surrounding neighborhoods like Latham, Cohoes, Watervliet, and so forth. So the avatar is homeowners in Albany county.
Step 3 was implementation. We installed a custom tracking software that monitors where website visitors go on the website. It creates a heat map so we can follow the customer on the journey to see what they click on, what their activity is, and make decisions with those data points. In addition, when potential customers go off site, it uses a tracking cookie to see where they go and what they do. We can then use that data to retarget them with Facebook and Google Ads. It’s all very high tech.
After using the tools for a period of 2 weeks, we noticed that most of the traffic was coming into ADB from a deck repair forum called Decks 2 Go. That was an interesting find. We advised that they create an account on that website and post to the forum offering their services and advice, which in turn spiked traffic further over the following week. The 2nd highest amount of traffic was coming in from people googling the keyword “deck builder albany”. After learning that, we advised ADB to switch some of the wording around on their homepage to better optimize for that search term.
With these two minor changes, we saw some pretty impressive results. Albany Deck Builders experieced a 313% increase in website traffic and a 2.3x increase in call volume. Due to the increase in calls, ADB hired an additional sales rep and was able to close 37% of the callers as opposed to 29% just a few weeks prior. That last metric is likely due to an increase in warm leads from the forum and more targeted leads from the primary search term. I hope you enjoyed the case study. We’ll be back with another one in a few weeks as we are currently working with two additional local business owners.