I taught myself PPC and then CRO in 3 months, then well over doubled a companies conversion rates

TLDR; I taught myself PPC and CRO in a couple months, well over doubled the conversion rates and more than halved the cost/conversion for the company that I work for, I want more experience within other industries so am willing to do this for free for a couple of people if I can see room for improvement with your campaigns. No bull shit, no hidden costs or anything, I just want experience so I can eventually charge for my services.

This company is a national franchise in NZ and operates in 8 different areas. I've included screenshots of the performance of 3 of them, happy to provide screen shots of the other 5 if you think I'm bullshitting you.

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Proof 1

Proof 2

Proof 3

EDIT: adding in a screenshot of all 8 campaigns combined. Proof 4

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I was sick of studying, sick of being a broke student and wanted a break from things. So I started searching around online for some jobs and came across one that was titled something like 'Google Adwords person needed urgently'. I had never heard of Google Adwords before, but I was 3/4 of my way through my CompSci degree so figured that because it's computer related I should be able to at least pick up the basics. Anyway, the job description read something similar to 'We are looking for a person who can take over the Google Adwords campaigns of our franchise because the current agency that does it is crap'. I Googled 'Google Adwords' to find out what it is so I had a basic idea, it seemed pretty straight forward, people search for their services, I show them ads.

I ended up ringing the company up on a Thursday night, and was honest with them, I told them straight up I've got 0 experience with Google Adwords or any form of marketing, but I know my way around computers. Long story short I said give me 3 months to learn how to use Adwords and then I'll take over your campaigns. They ended up telling me they're currently outsourcing the management of their campaigns to a marketing agency and they're getting shit service and shit results so they want someone who can do it in-house and that they would consider my offer. Probably out of shear luck, they invited me in on Friday morning for an interview, then got me back in early afternoon for a follow up interview, offered me the job and I started Monday.

Anyway fast forward a couple of months, I've figured out how to use Adwords and also discovered what conversion rate optimisation is. I took over their campaigns mid June this year and asked if I could make a few basic changes to their website and tidy up their campaigns cause they were complete fucking messes (no idea what the fuck the 'marketing agency' was doing with their campaigns).

Each franchisee has their own page that has information about the areas they service, what services they offer (all franchisees offer the same service, but there is just information on those pages to save customers going to the 'Our Services' page), a bit of background information, testimonials and a contact form. The pages were pretty messy and had no clear structure, so I proposed we make the following changes:

1. Include a clear concise message in the headline about what we do, followed up by a CTA that was bold and a different text colour.
2. Remove a lot of the bullshit from above the fold and put it down the bottom of the page (was told we couldn't delete it fully because of SEO reasons).
3. Bring the contact form to the top of the page and remove a couple of the unnecessary form fields.

This got results instantly (check my proof images - first red circle). The results varied from area to area, but all of the conversion rates at least doubled, or were very near it, and some went up a lot more than 2X. Needless to say, I was pretty stoked that I'd manage to teach myself PPC and CRO in a few months and then out perform a marketing agency.

I delved a bit deeper into CRO and ended up learning up landing pages. I convinced by boss to let me get Unbounce so that I could make the landing pages myself and be able to optimise them without us having to pay the company the manages our website. He agreed and let me do it (I'll just add this in here, no one in this company has any clue about digital marketing so basically anything I suggested they just said go ahead and try it) so I made each franchise a couple of landing pages for each service they offered. Again, got amazing results basically instantly (check the proof images - second red circle). Conversion rates doubled again (just under for some regions, well over for other regions), and I have been optimising them since and the conversion rates have been slowly climbing.

I'll also add in that I can't track phone calls because we don't have forwarding numbers in NZ, the only company that offers that service is the agency that my boss fired, so for obvious reasons, he doesn't want to do business with them. I'm able to track calls that come from mobile though with click-to-call buttons. So it is highly likely that the stats are much better than what I can see.

Anyway, I would really like to be able to build up a portfolio of companies that I have helped, I'm not asking for any payment in return because well.. I don't have a lot of experience, the only thing you'd have to pay for is your PPC costs and Unbounce but that would be set up directly so I'm not involved at all with the payments. If you end up being happy with the results I'll produce for you after a couple months then maybe we could arrange something otherwise am happy to part ways, no dramas.

But I want to be able to charge for this in the future, but before I do so I want to be able to say 'Yes I helped these companies improve their conversion rates and costs per conversions, I can help yours as well'. I want to focus on service based companies because that's what where I see the most room for improvement (looked a lot of local sites in NZ that are terribly optimised for conversions).

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