let's not be doing 10 different channels, 15 different netherlands girl number channels, let's focus in on three channels, which we know work. And we focused on these three, paid channels, such as Google AdWords, SEO, and review sites, review sites, being things like G2, Capterra, in our case, it was particularly Clutch, but there's a number of different ones. And what the strategy was, was we needed to apply both a short, mid and long term across those three channels in order to get that pipeline engineered pretty swiftly.
So let's go through each of them. First one, paid. What we found when we inspected a number of the paid campaigns that Rootstrap had done previously is they were targeted at that motivated entrepreneur. And how do we know that? Because it was the type of language, got an idea, or bring your vision to life, all of these are not necessarily wrong, but targeting the wrong audience. Suddenly we switched around the language in our ads and we started focusing more on increasing ROI, revenue generation, helping your business scale, these types of terms that are more appealing to a corporate audience, as opposed to an entrepreneur audience.
So there's our short term focus and suddenly we start to see a massive improvement. In the previous year, we'd only gained about, I want to say 200 or 250,000 in pipeline from PPC, suddenly it was three million. So this sort of rapid transformation can happen in a short space of time with paid.
Then we look at something that's a bit more expansive, we look at the review sites. We noticed that our presence on these review sites was very diminished, it just hadn't been nurtured. And so we spend the time going through gathering those reviews from those clients, tapping the shoulder of those clients who maybe hadn't worked for us in several years, but who still liked the work that we did for them.
And we nurtured that presence, we build the relationship with the account reps and suddenly we're in a place where those prospective clients are looking because prospective clients are always going to be comparing us to other vendors. So we want to make sure that when they're going to some place that they might vet us, like a review site, that we stand out, that we look good, that we have a level of credibility that people are going to go, "Yes, I want to contact Rootstrap, I don't want to contact someone else." And then finally, the more mid to longer term, the SEO play. As anyone knows in SEO, you put out a piece of content, you might not rank for six, nine, might even be 12 months, but you invest in it because it's able to create a ready audience around different topics that are related to your business. This is where I was able to hire an SEO consultant, a previous friend of mine, who I'd worked with.
