Case Study: Optimizing TNOLA Languages’ Campaigns for Lead Generation in a Niche Market

Challenge

TNOLA Languages is a leading provider of high-quality, comprehensive language services in the Gulf South region. Following a recent rebrand, TNOLA Languages engaged Online Optimism to increase awareness and website traffic. After a successful Google display, social ads, and SEO campaign, TNOLA Languages sought to redirect their budget toward lead generation in the New Orleans and Houston markets through Google search ads.

The TNOLA Languages website, showing their Seamless Event Interpretation services.

A Google ad for TNOLA that reads "Translation with a Human Touch - Certified Court Interpreter"

A Google ad for TNOLA that reads "Elevate Your Events With TNOLA - Expert Conference Translation"

A Google ad for TNOLA that reads "Communicate from Anywhere - Expert Video Interpreters"

Insights

While TNOLA Languages is among the most qualified and trusted language service providers in the Gulf South, they operate in a niche industry and its search engine landscape is crowded with AI and machine-powered language software and inaccurate translation tools. Additionally, TNOLA sought to expand their presence into the competitive Houston market.

Fortunately, before the search campaign launched, Online Optimism constructed several conversion-optimized landing pages for key services identified by TNOLA. These pages not only formed a robust campaign foundation but, coupled with Online Optimism’s previous efforts to boost organic rankings, increased TNOLA’s visibility on the search engine results page.

Strategy

Entering a niche Google Ads landscape and a competitive geographic market prompted the Digital Ads team to start small — launching the campaigns with granular location and keyword targeting while meticulously stewarding the budget. To boost traffic, the team strategically expanded by implementing aggressive negative keywords, leveraging TNOLA’s industry expertise and call tracking to measure relevance.

Employing engagement-based conversions, the team trained Google Ads’ machine learning to automatically bid more aggressively for high-intent users. This surgical approach, coupled with the alignment of campaign keywords and dedicated landing pages, effectively targeted a highly-specific user group seeking precisely what TNOLA Languages offers.

Results

Narrowing in on Engaged Traffic

Starting with specific, geographically tight campaigns resulted in lower impression share during gradual expansions into larger markets. However, the click-through rate increased over time through rigorous negative keyword additions, signaling a growing and relevant audience.

Month	Impression Share	CTR
07-2023	79.17%	9.57%
08-2023	58.04%	8.39%
09-2023	42.24%	6.77%
10-2023	49.29%	9.37%
11-2023	49.46%	9.58%
12-2023	47.42%	10.09%

Delivering Specialized Leads

Once campaigns were fully expanded into larger, more competitive markets, the team lowered cost-per-click while continuing to bring in relevant leads through stringent negative keyword additions and consistent improvements to quality scores.

Month	Lead Conversions	Cost-Per-Click
07-2023	4	$10.72
08-2023	4	$18.98
09-2023	14	$33.03
10-2023	11	$16.91
11-2023	19	$17.02
12-2023	14	$16.01

From the Client

As a small business, it’s difficult to reach the people who need your services, especially when dealing with a specialization like ours. We compete with large corporations with huge ad spends, and tangentially related products and services. OO’s personalized approach included reviewing the leads we were generating to ensure we were in fact getting in front of the folks that needed us, allowing us to focus on actually serving those clients rather than marketing ourselves to them.