Record Revenues in First Responder Software

PSTrax is a privately owned first responder inventory management software company. Their inventory and checklist software is used by over 1,200 fire-EMS agencies, from single–station volunteer agencies to career agencies with 100+ stations. 

After working together for four years, we achieved:

• Record leads and revenue
• Full attribution on the source of leads, opportunities, and revenue
• Increased scale in Facebook and Google Ads campaigns with continued profitability
• A massive increase in organic rankings, traffic, and leads

The Challenge

Like many PureSEM customers, PSTrax revenues had primarily grown through inbound leads sourced from paid, conferences, referrals, and partnerships with related software companies. 

When we were first introduced, PSTrax had basic Google Ads campaigns. They needed to implement a more sophisticated paid strategy and they knew it could work better because they heard a partner was getting great results. 

They had relied on Google recommendations to help manage their account and weren’t generating enough quality monthly leads. 

Worse, they weren’t sure to what extent these leads were actually turning into opportunities and sales. Their marketing attribution relied on asking, “How did you hear about us?.” 

Ramping up marketing contribution

They’d seen considerable initial success with building their business, but they needed to expand their marketing impact to continue to grow at the same rate, or even faster. 

In addition to being more difficult to grow at the same rate from a larger base, they also had to stay out ahead of their competition in the market

The PureSEM Solution

From a digital marketing perspective, PSTrax didn’t have sophisticated tracking to understand what was working and what wasn’t, let alone why. 

The first challenge to address was to stop relying on word-of-mouth data from sales conversations and instead start getting an accurate picture of what was happening with their campaigns using digital attribution. 

Attribution to measure sales pipeline

There is no value in testing campaigns without knowing the impact on opportunities, sales pipeline, and revenue. 

We know this, so as a first step, we implemented PureSEM’s marketing attribution software and connected it to PSTrax’s CRM, HubSpot, so that we could optimize the campaigns accordingly. 

We immediately found a huge amount of opportunity and started collecting the data in order to strategically reprioritize and expand efforts successfully and sustainably.

“With PureSEM’s help, we’re not a shoot-from-the-hip company anymore - we’re data-driven. As a result, we’ve expanded and continue to expand our digital marketing campaigns.”

- Scott Bergeron, President & Co-Founder, PSTrax

Google Ads production heats up

Over the next several months, we rotated through multiple tests and bid automation technologies, including third-party software, Google’s own automated bidding features, and manual bidding. 

The campaign results kept improving as we ran tests on different campaigns, keywords, and copy. The results justified increased budgets, which allowed us to create even better content for testing.

Reallocation of budgets for greater impact

With data collected from the new attribution dashboards, we found significant differences in the ratio of leads to opportunities to revenue between the unoptimized Facebook campaigns and optimized Google Ads.

We followed a data-driven approach to continuously re-allocate the ideal budget to campaigns and channels that generate the most revenue at the lowest cost, maximizing return on ad spend (ROAS).

Sales pipeline from Facebook doubles

With a solid foundation behind us, we expanded our partnership to manage all of the digital marketing campaigns, including Paid Social and SEO. 

We quickly implemented the same processes we’d used with Google Ads testing on Facebook Ads, and over the next few quarters, Facebook Ads results doubled. 

Record Revenues as Digital Marketing Takes Off

To build on our successes, we conducted an organic analysis and found that almost all organic traffic came from branded searches – where users searched with “PSTrax” as part of the search term. 

We found a large gap in organic search traffic compared to Google Ads data, presenting an opportunity to increase targeted organic traffic massively.

Implementation of SEO Framework

Over the next several quarters, we implemented our comprehensive SEO framework to gain high visibility in targeted search traffic. We built out a keyword universe using all of our data from Google Ads and the additional research we continued to perform. We then created a shared content calendar based on the most important topics.

Using the data, we optimized PSTrax’s site and launched a content marketing strategy.

As a result, organic visibility more than doubled, with most target keywords hitting page one, and with half of those keywords in the top three results.

Inbound Marketing is a core sales channel 

During our time working together so far, PXTras has seen incredible results:

• All-time high record leads 
• Celebrated their best month of revenue in the company’s history
• Doubled Google Ads results
• Doubled Facebook Ads results
• More than doubled search visibility, with most target keywords hitting the first page of Google and half of the target keywords appearing in the top 3 positions

Together, we worked to transition PSTrax's digital marketing program into an evidence-based approach, allocating marketing budgets to produce maximum pipeline and revenue. 

Using a solid foundation of data, a proven testing methodology, strategic campaign design, and hands-on management produced the results we were both looking for.