Maley Digital helps Door Controls Direct to boost their sales via Google Ads

Door Controls Direct is a market leading retailer selling architectural ironmongery and digital access systems based in Dorset. The business was founded in 1918 and was known as Spiller Architectural Ironmongery. Over a century later, the group trading name was changed to Door Controls Direct to reflect their growing niche in the access control products market.

Guy Brewer, Director of Door Controls Direct explains: “In around 2012 we recognised a significant shift in how our customers wanted to purchase products from us and so we revamped and invested in our website. This included SEO and some early attempts at PPC. We had some small bursts of success but we realised that we really didn’t have the right company on board.

“Eventually we started working with a better digital media company who revamped the website and did a good job at SEO from which we saw more traffic sent to the site. We wanted to put some effort into Google Ads and offered our digital media company the opportunity to run our PPC. They were a multi-discipline agency who did websites, email campaigns, design and branding. While they served us pretty well in setting up and running some PPC campaigns, it was clear that it wasn’t their primary area of expertise and after some initial success, the results from the campaign stagnated and eventually, flatlined.

Covid provided an opportunity to revamp the website and add more products

When COVID happened, we took the opportunity to really focus on our website. Our websites have always been ok, but the day-to-day work always got in the way and we never had the time to get on top of it. So bizarrely the pandemic gave us the time we needed to refresh the site and add a lot more products.

Once business life settled back into some kind of new normal, we knew the inevitable commercial downturn wasn’t far away. This was the point when we knew that we had to take action to beef up our stagnant Google Ad campaigns.

One of the beauties of promoting your business on Google is that people go to the site to search for what they want. So by the time they reach our website, there’s a strong chance that they are ready to buy. With this in mind, we decided to look for a new PPC agency, but this time we were clear that we wanted to work with a dedicated PPC firm who had a deeper knowledge and real experts on their team. We’ve seen before that most multi-function agencies will do a good job on one thing, but there inevitably comes a point when they’ll want to upsell us on something else.

We needed a PPC specialist agency to give our stagnant PPC campaigns a boost

In 2021, we asked around for recommendations and searched for PPC experts. And that’s how we found Maley Digital. We liked their focus and the way they worked. We were also impressed by their reviews from existing and past clients and signed up for their PPC Management service.

Our primary goal was to use PPC to increase sales. But in addition to that we were keen for Door Controls Direct to have more visibility in the market. We had added quite a lot of extra products to the website bringing our total to around 1700. The previous PPC campaigns were only set up for a tiny fraction of our total range and so we needed the new agency to ensure that as many products as possible got their share of attention.

A focus on Google Smart Shopping (and later, Performance Max)

When Maley came on board, they spent most of their time focusing on the Google Smart Shopping campaigns which we had not used before.

Right from the start Maley delivered a significant increase in direct sales and site traffic. Not only that, we’ve also seen an increase in the number of sales enquires coming through. The strategy recommended by Maley was to keep things simple and focus on the Google Smart Shopping campaigns and then look at performance ads for some of our top products.

The relationship with the Maley team is very different to how we worked with our previous agency. Firstly we never have to chase them for meetings, they are very proactive at keeping in touch. Their reporting is detailed and they always give us context on what the data is telling us. It’s a real two way relationship with a discussions on budgets, new ideas and tweaks that need to be made on our campaigns. 

We felt like our previous agency was on ‘autopilot’ – Maley Digital is very different

With our previous agency we felt like things were just on autopilot with very little critical analysis. Working with Maley Digital we’re now confident that someone is ‘on it’ all the time. This is essential, particularly when there are significant budgets being ploughed into the Google campaigns. We need to see a good return on our investment.

Since we started with Maley in 2021 we’ve seen growth on growth consistently and we see that PPC has been the catalyst that has allowed our business to continually move onto the next level, and the next. We’re now looking at upping our spend because we know we’ll see results. This growth has allowed us to invest in the business and employ an in-house Head of Digital to work with Maley, and manage our website and other digital activities.

We’re looking forward to a continued successful relationship with Maley Digital.”

The Results In More Detail

• Within our third month of management, we recorded the highest revenue from Google Ads that the company had ever experienced, with no increase to ad spend.
• Comparing 2023 to date (at time of writing: Jan 1 – Sept 30) to the same period in 2021 (when we first started working with the client), we have recorded a 244% increase in revenue from PPC, from a 175% increase in Ad spend. Therefore, we have both scaled the account and made it more efficient simultaneously.
• The client is thrilled and has recently engaged with us on a long term partnership to grow the account even further.
• The below graph shows the growth of the account from Jan 21 to date. We took over management in July 2021. We have removed confidential data such as exact costs and revenue.