s11s

set the channel description: Paid marketing - Google Ads et al

Since it's a bit quiet in here, let me ask the performance experts. What metrics do you optimise for SaaS performance campaigns?

Have you thought about thinking about your campaigns in terms of growth loops?

<@U02PDC6B0HH> could you share an anecdote of thinking about campaigns in terms of growth loops?

<https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops|https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops>

Check this out.

The simplest way to go about doing this is to think about the user journey and actions. Using it derive growth loops for your business. Followed by mapping campaigns to these growth loops. How the campaigns are acting as catalyst to increase the output of growth loop.

You can find more information on this on the reforge blog.

<@U02PDC6B0HH> this is amazing. It seems so obvious when you read it. However, would the referral stage of the AARRR model not be considered to loop? That's still using existing users to acquire new ones. Except that the company/product owner doesn't have much control over that apart from incentivising the referrals. Thoughts?

You can define referral loops without the funnel before it. Goes like - acquire new customer &gt; customer refers others &gt; Acquire new customer

Almost like a sub-loop within the largest system, yeah

<http://andrewchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/a16z_growth_deck.pdf>

page #36

You can check out MetaMatch (Product from Metadata). It does 80% of what Clearbit X does and cheaper alternative to clearbit.

Metadata for both audience matching and spend optimisation and also for their brilliant support 

I saw lot more traction with conversational ads on Linkedin i.e increase in meetings booked and form fills. The target audience were the ones showing intent on G2.

We have been trying it for the last four months. Its not given us any results. Our EMEA team has seen some breakthroughs though. They have basically tied it with egifting.

I have seen Middling results - maybe got to do with Target Audience

<@U02UJBF2Y4C> - I targeted the G2 intent ones

biggest problem with conversational or normal inMail ads is scalability. One person will receive one inMail/month from that campaign.
otherwise conversational ads can be really helpful provided the entire inmail thread is well sequenced.
it usually works well as an additional touch point to banner lead gen ads.

we’ve tried an ABM approach with conversational ads, the primary goal being content consumption or event registration targeting mostly problem-aware folks (it is roughly a 50-50 mix of accounts we’ve tried to reach via outbound and accounts we’ve never reached via outbound)

the digital team is happy with the results :D

havent tried high intent conversion goals yet

Me! I didn’t use it for selling though. We used it for hiring and it worked wonders :smile:

<@U02PDC4883V> what was your cta for g2 intent? bofu content consumption or ask for a demo/talk to sales?

We had 3 different campaigns
BoFU, MoFu as well as ToFu

MoFu showed the most promise

<@U02U6FZRHRV> tried this extensively, maybe he could add some thoughts?

We have been experimenting with LinkedIn Ads for G2 Intent for a few months now.  We tried Free Trial initially with no success. We noticed 70-75% of the traffic is mobile users. We then tried providing BOFU content - ebook, we are seeing decent results but the CPL has been high. We are looking at ways to improve this.

I have seen decent-good success with Conversational Ads. I completely agree the CPLs cn get high, but the qualification % far exceeds any other push channels we've tested. Getting the targeting is where I would spend most of the time. Tried with ICP lookalike targeting and G2 intent audiences. But fairly regular Interest + Function + Experience targeting has gotten the best results so far.

I did an A/B testing on Conversation ads. Ads with some offer &amp; without offers. Once the offers are removed, conversions dropped drastically.

Yes. Same here these days. Happening a lot in the last 2 months.

Yes, it's actually due to RBI's mandate on Card Tokenisation. Online merchants, will not be allowed to store card details within their environment post June 30, 2022 and hence LinkedIn looks like in transition mode.

Hi nikhil,
As discussed with Siddharth you can try offline billing if your spend is on the higher end.

:grinning: I was talking about how I am also "sms generation" and tend to not use threads

it is not the ad format, it is how you use it

Cold email and linkedin inmail worked really well and creating a followup whatsapp community did well to retain 75% people to the webinar .

Absolutely right what <@U02V979LY03> says and in addition to that I even dial/write(on LinkedIn) to relevant audience (quality contacts),, to be there on the session. We leverage our past attendee data (who opted in for newsletter and other information). Short email works better for us.

From experience,
Platform- Google
Format- Search Ads.

I always thought/knew that the intent of someone who is searching on google is high. i saw it in low volumes today in. my company the CVR was 60% (google search) and overall cvr for our product is around 15%. (Signup to Starting a free trial with credit card submitted)

Great.. We tried our luck on Google Ads. Our CTR was over 5% but no conversions. We had a very bad LP but still not even a single conversion. Any suggestion for the LP? <https://www.datamyth.com/campaign-signup/>

the search keyword that bring traffic to your site - your website doesnt solve the intent? or doesnt tell how it does?

I could possible recommend - page speed ( <https://web.dev/measure/>)  and Heading too big and subheading too small i think

The 10/90 Messaging Layout Rule. Roughly the top 10% of the page is all about matching 1) the visitor’s stage of awareness and 2) the message(s) that led them here. <https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DmC1vpOU8AALJEG.jpg:large>

This is a very generic question and very generic answers. I do not believe that Google Search would work for everyone. Here are the cases Google Search Marketing fails:

• No pre-defined category for the product (no search volume)
• If you are selling to Enterprises and your ICP is higher management or ACV &gt; 100k highly unlikely that you will get the ROI. 
• Also, you should have enough social proof on your website, i.e. at least 2-3 testimonials and customer logos if you are in a crowded market
• Also, doesn’t work well if your product is a high touch product and can not be self serve. 

In our case, the most performing channel is Google search ads. However, we generate free trials from all the paid mediums, but when it comes to MQL to SQL, the Google search ads outperform.

&gt; my company the CVR was 60% (google search)
<@U030SDYNX7V> if you dont mind sharing, what queries were these? were they related to your brand or to your category? or were they very high intent queries like XYZ signup?

I dont have strong insights - but my guess it would be tilted towards - brand search - we only advertise on facebook at this point

and to add we have zero SEO/organic presence at this point

got it, yea then brand search makes sense, which also explains such a high cvr from search engines

are you working on improving the brand search vol? if yes, id love to learn what youre doing

we’re currently investing in regional pr heavily and have seen an improvement in the brand search vol, we’ve also tried some radio interviews but unless we do more it’s hard to measure the impact

nothing at this point - at this point we are re-branding - hence no PR/ etc - our previous brand had gathered a really BAD rep - all the branding activities before we completed the rebranding process

also this is our b2c brand :slightly_smiling_face: uthna funding nahi hai :slightly_smiling_face:

Have done it in the past. Saw organic and high intent search conversions increase

ads for awareness would def be a good investment

absolutely. haven't been able to attribute the outcomes a 100% but by first principles, it should help keep your leads warm. best is to use it post MQL stage and before they become an opporunity for best bang for your buck.

Absolutely! But execution is very important. Remember that it's very easy for a user to click the skip ad button.

Youtube for awareness (With default targeting options) is money thrown down the drain for B2B SaaS. Difficult to measure awareness with metrics like Views and VTR. YouTube for Action, YouTube for Remarketing are few sensible options (Not that they drive performance, at least you can be sure about awareness created amongst the right folks)

I agree with <@U02V22EUXM4> here ... Default targeting on YouTube may not be the best way target specific audience. 
YT has given us good results in remarketing but not too many conversions.

In my experience when it comes to Saas and targeting Indie Audience, some sort of lead magnet is the best awareness solution. That way they enter the funnel in a slightly more qualified way

<https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bramvanderhallen_facebook-facebookads-digitalmarketing-activity-6894611679473479680-so3W|https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bramvanderhallen_facebook-facebookads-digitalmarketing-activity-6894611679473479680-so3W>

^some good tips in this thread. a lot of things I have tried personally (although they haven't worked that well but nothing wrong with the techniques per se, they may work for someone else)

What is the budget? Who is your target customer? Are you using Facebook to remarket or prospect?

Hey <@U02VCFWDZ5J> - We are looking at B2B SaaS/E-Commerce as a Target Industry and from a persona standpoint it would primarily be Finance/CXOs/PMs. Also at the moment it is primarily to prospect.

are you mapping custom audiences with their personal emails or work emails?

What is the best way to scale the Facebook ads while maintaining ROAS?

1. If linked with a LinkedIn partner(like Hubspot), it can update dynamically too.
2. Targeted company list along with more filters of relevant ICP renders the list too small to target in most cases unless list size post that is 10k+ (which is rare for most businesses)

+ to what Shubham said,
1. you could also set up a Zap if your tool doesn’t have an LI integration
2. Broader the audience, lower the cost - sacrifice the job role targeting to broaden the audience and get a bigger audience

1. Not through the campaign manager but you can apply for Linkedin developer program and do it via their API. See more info <https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/linkedin/marketing/integrations/matched-audiences/matched-audiences#update-audience-lists-dynamically|here>.
2. Yes and No. Depends on what factors are you using to build that list. If you're just using firmographic and demographic data to make these lists you will get limited success but if you club this data with intent and behavioural data using tools like 6sense or Bombora, then you can make much smarter lists and improve your impact.

<@U031P56UZGR>, for part 2, can do audience enrichment with third party data. Seta Metamatch Audiences

Dynamic list &gt; Static List - you should also create dynamic lists for exclusion.

Yes start serving ads to company list mid way but I would say create a company level dashboard or engagement report using supermetrics or factors . This will gives you clear picture. And don't start conversational ads in parallel to SDR outbound emails. Use conversational ads as a last resort or for pipeline acceleration. 

What is the Audience match list in Linkedin ?

Have not done it myself. But does not Cross Domain tracking help here?
<https://support.google.com/searchads/answer/9165554?hl=en|https://support.google.com/searchads/answer/9165554?hl=en>

Yeah you would just need to ask your web developer to create cookie for cross domain tracking. In addition you would also need to update your cookie language to include this new domain for google ads cookies. The slower way to do it would be to have an interim page where you house the form and then this form sends the information to your app form on this <http://app.domain.com|app.domain.com>

When the user signs up using outlook or Google, it will fire a conversion event in Firebase, you can integrate Firebase with Google Ads &amp; Analytics. 

<https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6397604?hl=en|https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6397604?hl=en>

So as long as the sign up happens, it does not matter if they move to another domain because the goal is to track the conversions irrespective of domain. 

To simplify you can fire event on the click but do not count it as a conversion to know how many are initiating and then Firebase signup will give you the funnel view. And can look at the cross domain tracking as well. 

Started with an audit. Prioritised technical SEO activities while planning for keyword optimisation.  Moving to more efficiently CDNs

For SEO focus, then you need 2 people, 1 technical+on-page SEO person if the site is large enough and 1 off-page SEO person who will do quality link building through things like guest blogging, guestographics, online PR, HARO, etc.

Unfortunately, most agencies just share a screamingfrog report with 5987 broken alt tags and call it a day.

SEO Checklist.pdf

Here is a comprehensive SEO checklist we co-created internally.

Thank you. This is a treasure. <@U031KD0PNTX> What has been the most successful way to get guest blogging and guestographics? Does cross posting of your content on channel/inventory partner pages helps? <@U02VBNKU9T6> any examples of CDNs.

Manual outreach, building relationships has worked well for me, but tools like ninjaoutreach are recommended by others. I recommend a cut off at DA 30. I usually keep the content unique and complementing my keywords than competing with my own.

Keyword research - From your own set of seed keywords &amp; competitive analysis (either SEMrush, ahrefs or Ubersuggest top pages report)

Assigning Business Potential Scores or Impact score -  A score of 1 to 3. Where 3 has the best software purchase intent, 1 is in the top of the funnel.

Understanding SERP analysis for each keyword to nail content type, format &amp; angle - inspired from ahrefs

Preparing detailed content outlines or briefs based on SERP analysis before assigning to writers.

Interlinking content to form clusters.

Refreshing blogs that haven't been updated for a while.

SEO is basically understanding user intent behind the query and serving the right content.

------------

_"creating backlinks in directories." -_ Do they still matter? Aim for backlinks on relevant sites where you can get traffic to your targeted pages.

<@U02VAPDACUQ> any tool that can post your content to your category websites and get you backlinks except tools like taboola

No idea, <@U02V979LY03>. Zero knowledge on this

i have heard about disney complaining about jarvis :slightly_smiling_face:

Lol. Circle is trademarked :joy:
I have a follow up question on this. How do you circumvent trademark violations? Assuming you were to use an ad copy with the term circles, and there was no other way to say it.
Much thanks

sounds like jugaad but my best bet would be to put it on the creative if the layout allows it lol

That sounds good for retargeting or display!

What about search ads? I assumed Rahul was talking about search ads such as RSAs.

ChadMB.jpg

How many times this scenario plays out :disappointed_relieved:

more often in b2c than in b2b but yes as performance marketers we need to look beyond numbers to bring the human element in creatives. most creatives are bland and boring, so huge opportunity :)

you gotta see our creative - if you commit suicide - i am not responsible

I have very limited experience but first problems in such campaigns is the audience. Atleast for the first few thousand dollars, try asking for qualifying questions (based on your specific app use case) before letting people download the app. What this will do is two-fold:

• you will know the people you're targeting is actually the people you're getting
• once you make a correlation of who is actually using your app after installing, you can tweak your campaigns to reach more of that audience
Initially focus on quality, once you have the quality then scale.

Did you try optimising campaigns for in-app actions? Is the pattern you are seeing only with installs from UAC or other sources as well?

1.) Currently didn't optimize the campaign for In-App activity as data is low. Soon going to start it.
2.) Running Facebook App install campaign as well and optimized the delivery for App event, after doing that cost per conversion increase by 5x

In google previously we got approx 8k installs in universal app install campaign and In-App only 300 people signup

There is a potentially a problem with your onboarding.
8k installs to 300 sign ups. That's 4%.

 People are installing and then either unable to sign up, or face a roadblock due to which they don't sign up.

What is the uninstall rate pre and post campaign?

What is the app, if I may ask?


If you setup a uac to only get installs that is what you will get. Setup sign up as the in app action you want to optimise for.

I'm fact I always optimised for revenue, so if you can optimise for the in app purchase action. Or whatever is the core goal of your app.

Uac is actually a shining example of google’s ad capabilities because they control the entire ecosystem. They are trying to make all ads like UAC.

Both on FB and Google, you have to give sufficient time for ‘In-app’ action objective campaign to work. Beauty of machine learning campaigns, the cost of action will very likely be high when you start and it will eventually settle down. If cost is a constraint, you can always run Tcpa but an unrealistic tcpa wont burn money at all. Installs is a vanity metric. If the installs are not driving any in-app actions, then no point in driving those installs right? You might want to check your app analytics platform for onboarding issues. See where exactly people are dropping off. Issue could be as simple as, screen not loading &amp; OTP not delivered. Try using app journey video ad in your UAC campaigns to set expectations before the users download the app. Have seen significant success with this. 

Thankyou so much <@U02V22EUXM4> <@U02VB8K88CT> <@U02USELSBRT>. I'll wait for some data and changing my campaign to in-app activity.

Whatever you do, dont spend on affiliate networks

Please post this in <#C0318NH5G3C|> we don't allow self promotion in the community.

I am looking to learn more about advertising platforms other than Google/Facebook/Linkedin etc.

can help :slightly_smiling_face: built the DSP at InMobi and Affiliate network. But you should start with DV 360

are you talking about the supply side or the demand side?

Experiment &gt; Opinion

Huge variance in approaches by companies, geography and keywords across the board. Hard for opinions to scale, IMO.

We do and good results so far.

• Have a dedicated landing page comparing your product vs competitor's
• Good ad copy - You can directly mention you are a "Competitor name Alternative" in your first heading. That way, you can weed out their loyal fanbase and entice the right audience. 
• Add more negative keywords as you grow
• Negative keywords that proves they are not in buying/evaluation phase -  keywords including login, support, glassdoor, employee benefits....
• It's much easier to personalize the demo for leads who are coming via competitor keywords. Even if they do not enter the competitor name in the demo booking use case box, we still know their intent via UTM. 

the initial deployment of the codes is easy. i am asking more on the following front:
• deploying codes on the buttons of the landing pages (for beginners)
since I believe the no-code websites will have difficulty deploying these codes when bootstrapped.

are you referring to a mobile app signup or a web app signup?

if you mean mobile app, you can use the ga sdk or any other standard attribution platform’s sdks

if you mean web app, then it isn’t much different from your lp form (assuming you have your web app residing in a diff sub domain, you can achieve this by a combination of ga and gtm)

without standard attribution platforms SDK its very tricky for android / probably impossible in iOS

i have heard of firebase(GA)/ adjust / branch. sure there are plenty more

<@U02U94HSBV4> Can we connect for a quick chat?

<@U02UZKPBZ6D> - you can capture it on a mobile lp as you do on your web lp

On an app - you will need tools

Hey <@U02PDC4883V>, thanks for reply. Can you please let me know which tool to use.

We are currently using firebase &amp; branch.

Using branch we can track that which user signup from which campaign right?

we had briefly flirted with adjust with very less focus and even less success. tracking android signups is there for sure. even webengage can track that

iOS is generally a black box and different platform overcome that with their own hacky solution

Love this! Such a simple yet effective tactic! I have used a very similar method on Quora to identify which answers to prioritize. Can see this working on reddit as well.

<@U031NC9B67L> what if you are targeting only 1 country and 1 category?

<@U02U6FZRHRV> if it is 1 country/1 category do the same exercise and see how much extra you're paying from google ads first position. 

<@U031NC9B67L> will DM you with my detailed use case and analysis so far. 

I would prefer to keep it attributed to performance (last click attribution) as lookalike will bring in people that were not a part of the funnel before. But curious to hear from everyone!

Interesting scenario. There are 3 things to consider here:

Content
Source
Medium

In the campaign that you mention,

Content = *ad content* which people clicked on before converting
Source = URLs of the content which was used to build lookalike aka *content*
Medium = Ad platform used to serve ads aka *paid*

So I will attribute the conversion to *paid as a medium* and *content as the source*.

^ In the above scenario I will go one step beyond and have media and sources for all touchpoints and THEN apply my attribution model on top of it.

Touchpoint 1 will have medium 1 and source 1
Touchpoint 2 will have medium 2 and source 2
...and so on.

On this data I will apply whatever attribution model I follow to get to the actual attribution result. Let me know if this part is not clear.

how we have simplified this is to look attribution and pipeline in two ways:-
• Direct or Acquired : Includes the channel name that acquired that contact
• Accelerated or Influenced(include all the content pieces available on website)
So for you particular case I will look at the Influenced pipe and further cut that down to utm_source=cpc/ppc for contacts influenced by content via paid campaigns

Good question.

For such exact scenarios I see a few team using the concept of Tactics and Offers. Every interaction (that you want to attribute) include both- a Tactic and an Offer.
1. A tactic is what drove the interaction-&gt; meaning the source/medium. E.g., google paid, google organic, an outbound email, a cold call, etc.
2. An offer is essentially what was offered as after the user was acquired using a tactic. Now let us a few common tactics vs offers here-
&gt; • for google paid as a tactic-&gt; usually there is a landing page with free trial, some product videos, an ebook, some useful content like competitor comparison charts, etc. These become offers!
&gt; • for product marketing email as a tactic-&gt; most common offer here would be the content of the email, ebook, case study, a calculator, etc.
Problem with current attribution is people end up mixing tactics and offers. It is important to look at both but separately. I see most teams focusing only on the tactics when both tactics and offers are equally important.

We all use utm_source/medium/campaign for "tactics" but rarely I see marketers using something for offer. One way is to use "utm_content" like <@U02USELSBRT> said. But don't confuse "utm_content" of the ad with that of what was the offer there. Maybe start using "utm_offer". And then analysing source/mediums/campaigns (i.e., tactics) separately and content (offers) separately. Interesting would be see what tactic works well with what offers.

Thank you Thank You so much for such detailed answer :pray::skin-tone-2:

I will take 1-2 days to properly grasp this and read more on it. Will get back, if I still have any doubt. Once again Thank You :slightly_smiling_face: