Case Study: MSP Adds 60k MRR In 1 Year Via PPC

In August of 2023 Tortoise and Hare began working with a new South Florida based MSP. The company reached out after reading some blog posts on the Tortoise and Hare website about running Google Ads for MSPs and wanted to know about what we could do to help them out. After a brief sales process, they decided to pilot a Google Ads campaign. This client had been running their own campaigns and had enlisted the help of several previous agencies in the past and said they were “frustrated“, “exasperated“, and “tired” of trying to crack the Google Ads code. They knew advertising worked but didn’t feel they had the right partner.

The MSP had developed an in-house platform that allowed them to reduce the cost of serving their customers and made their business more efficient and were trying to “crack the marketing code” so that they could scale up the number of customers on their platform and expand their revenue base.

Launching New Campaigns

Tortoise and Hare started out by configuring conversion tracking and adding in new conversions that weren’t previously in the account. They had conversion tracking for some form submissions and most phone calls but had gaps where they weren’t tracking all form submissions. Tortoise and Hare also added in tracking for full-page scans and link clicks to measure softer signals of campaign performance.

Tortoise and Hare launched new search campaigns as a starting point with ad groups configured for the key locations near their headquarters and a network of “NoLo” ad groups for keywords that didn’t have any sort of location indicator. We rolled out copy that made sense for each ad group and would strengthen click-through rates for each ad group.

Tortoise and Hare selected keywords based on extensive experience advertising in the MSP space and the large repository of negative keywords that helped save the client money and generate positive performance immediately.

In the first month, the client got approximately 5 new leads for their MSP and was able to close some new managed services seats right out of the gate. They were so impressed by the performance that they quickly decided to double the advertising budget and scale up faster.

Expanding The Advertising Effort

With the expanded budget, Tortoise and Hare made several structural changes to the advertising effort to lengthen the pipeline and both nurture and prospect with advertising. This included expanding into new advertising platforms, LinkedIn Ads, and Meta Ads. We did separate pixel installations and conversion tracking deployments for each individual platform as part of the expansion. Within the Google account, we also split the ad budget from a single prospecting campaign to a prospecting campaign, a known converters campaign, a display remarketing campaign, and a YouTube retargeting campaign. On LinkedIn and Meta we added in display remarketing campaigns that align with their objectives. We assisted in the development of creative assets that were branded to their company to support those campaigns.

This infrastructure created an advertising structure with approximately 75% of the budget prospecting for new leads and 25% of the budget working to stay top of mind with display remarketing efforts on website traffic and branded search campaigns to defend the brand and create positive experiences for down-funnel buyers.

Tuning The Bidding Algorithms

As budgets and campaigns ramped up it became critical to monitor performance and provide good data back to advertising platforms. Tortoise and Hare helped the client review approximately 1,500 calls per month on average coming in to the clients business to help them understand which calls were quality leads and which calls were junk. We used this data to extract click identifiers from quality callers using call tracking software and do conversion uploads for qualified leads back to advertising platforms in order to help tune bidding algorithms and generate better performance from advertising dollars.

Results Generated

Tortoise and Hare made a strong positive impact on the clients business. We started off with a helping them generate 5-15 leads per month and ramped that up to between 10 and 25 leads per month. In 2024 we helped the client add approximately 60k MRR equating to roughly 2 million to their top line over a forecastable 3 year period. We also provided backend support in a new website launch and helped them more than double the ad budget we started out with. We helped them expand from just doing Google Ads to multi-platform advertising across Google, LinkedIn, and Meta platforms (Facebook, Threads, and Instagram). We supported the client in many other facets, providing advice on SEO, marketing analytics, and weighing in on technical decisions related to martech stack choices.