s11s

Not a fixed monthly budget but a campaign on and off periodically (every 3-6 months). Alongwith that we tend to use G2 to create audiences that we use in our ad platforms.

Hi Anirudhh
Curious to know, since I’ve tried something similar in the past. On targeting G2 audiences via LI ads though, couldn’t see any positive delta than targeting ads to generic TG. Possibly because one person from XYZ company checks out G2 and ads get served to other people from the same XYZ company.
Had any other approach worked better?

<@U032WAF0HHC> completely agree and I had the same observation. You mentioned one of the reasons, I think other reason can be that these people are already late stage in their funnel (researching competitions), so the probability of an ad to sway their decision in your favour is probably too little. They'll just look at your ad and just ignore it. They may or may not have signed up for a free trial already, so that may cause some randomness. I just add this audience in the hope that it would make some prospect's life easier by a few clicks to come check our free trial if they haven't already :)

Seen the same - and I agree with Aniruddh’s observations. The only positive I have been able to derive is to use G2's buyer intent data to use on two fronts
1. Build Awareness on LI
2. Use it for outbound sequences
Both together have given us a more positive result

Seen the same.

If you do decide to continue with it, consider removing founders/owners titles. When running these ads for SaaS companies, that just led to targeting owners of other agencies looking for prospects.

Thanks for your responses <@U02USELSBRT> , <@U032WAF0HHC> <@U02PDC4883V> <@U0316K76612> 

Would love to know if you are leveraging multiple platforms together (G2, Capterra, Software Suggest) or focus only one platform.

Also, have you leveraged native advertising on any of these. How have the results been?

<@U02UMCVUFGT> yeah i have. i found impression and click volume to be super low. not enough to impact the lead volume in a meaningful way. it maybe however different for different industries.

We’ve been Spending around 400 $ /day  and 500 $ /day on capterra , and sourceforge  Considering the Click volume is limited with high CPC , We were able to influence some good middle of the funnel traffic .

<@U02PDC4883V>, what Buyer Intent data does G2 give ? Accounts looking at your G2 profile?

Hey <@U03158A1WPK> G2 gives you account details of orgs that have visited/researched your Profile, competition and category.

Loved seeing quadratic curves after a long time since 10th standard. There are multiple overarching themes here, but one key thing is incrementality and diminishing but positive returns
1. Growth flattens over a multi year period. Only way to arrest is, new Geo or new products, new channels of distribution. This requires capital of initial product success
2. Marketing campaigns are also layered. Need experimentation and data over period of time to pull back and change. 

<@U02PDC4883V> This is not just true in marketing but in every area of business in today's world. Product-market fit is also not a one time event (as many would think) but a moving goal post, so is market-channel fit, so is channel-messaging fit and so on.

One example is how FW scaled. They just kept adding more products, then geos and now channels. Very interesting case study.

Anybody worth their salt in growth has always said that no gains last forever and will always decay at some point not of your choosing.

This is why you always have to be testing for new opportunities (apply 80/20 role for maximizing what's working/hunting for what's next).

Excellent to see data supporting it - maybe fewer people will ask for a silver bullet or wish for "we just need to go viral"...

Yup, unfortunately. But you can take other countries’ data and figure out equivalent salary in India using PPP index ratios.

Create date field on hubspot has the date and time, but check your timezone settings in hubspot or convert it manually using formulas

Yes I created a date. It’s in GMT. I need to manually change GMT to pacific time zone I guess.

Do you mind sharing a template for reference?

One way to do is to export in timezone A in Excel and convert it to B there and then use Zapier to push it back

<https://www.quora.com/In-Excel-how-do-I-convert-data-into-a-different-timezone/answer/Ted-Pettit-1>

While uploading the file for preview, status shows “ this click’s GCLID has been altered it is invalid “. Please help 

Anyone here running Facebook ads which they believe are working great for them? Please DM - I would need just 20-30 min.

Do you have any experience in PPC, as in have you tried your hand at it and know what objectives you want to meet?

If SaaS, can make an intro to few folks I know.

Can put you in touch with a freelancer - i liked his thought process and results

Is PPC your core marketing channel, driving majority of the business results? If yes, try to build this function in-house, even though it might be slow and not efficient in the beginning. An in-house team will end up caring more and working much faster with internal teams than an agency who is working with multiple clients at once.

If PPC is a smaller contributor to your overall revenue (say 30% or less), then by all means outsource. You will get a team which has had experience working with multiple clients, so you will benefit from all that experience. This is the main benefit of an outsourced team especially in an area like PPC where every other week you'll see changes happening/new features in ad platforms and one needs to be very proactive to keep up with all these changes.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of a performance marketing agency(Spear Growth). I have also been part of in-house teams and personally think my answer is unbiased, but I still run an agency. 

There's a bunch of factors I can think of from the top fo my mind.

*Budget:*
Usually companies who step into PPC do it gradually. Gradually may mean different things for different companies. Some companies start with 3-4k USD, some with 10-20k USD. At least in India, this is the budget range I've seen.

If you're starting with 3-4k USD, it's probably too small to work with an agency. Doing it in house and getting some insights is preferred.
If you're starting at 10-25k USD, working with a good agency can save you a couple of experiments that makes it well worth the investment.

*Existing capacity &amp; bandwidth:*
Do you have people in your team who can manage it? And.. do they have time to do it? Do you want to run a small pilot to at least test the channel first?

Most companies I've worked with, don't do this. Setting up initial marketing channels is much more difficult that "gliding" them later on. It's just as difficult to rapidly scale them. So in those scenarios, it usually takes up more time that you initially think.

But, I have seen some companies successfully run a small pilot &gt; Outsource to an agency for a while &gt; Build out internal team

*PMF &amp; Message market fit:*
Do you have Product market fit? Do you know what messaging works?
If you don't, don't run the channel.
If you still want to, and have a good product marketer(can be the founder) who can dedicate time with the agency to run messaging experiments, then outsource.
Otherwise, probably keep it in house.

My advice: Don't use the channel in most cases.

FYI: Some agencies can help with this. They can have an extensive research and strategy module or/and workshops to help you fast-track this process.

*Potential of current marketing mix:*
If you already have a couple of marketing channels that are working well, can they be scaled instead?
Should you scale them first or really consider paid channels.

*Market state:*
Is there pre-existing demand and awareness for your product?
If so, you can run simple demand capture style ads and generate some quick pipeline for a decent ROI.
If not, even paid channels take time to stabilize and start working.

A lot of companies think paid will start working as soon as you switch it on. It can, but it depends on a bunch of factors, the industry and your standing in it are two major external factors.

*Urgency:*
How fast do you need to activate the channel?
If you need it to go live within 1-2 months, doing it internally will be difficult. Hiring, onboarding, setting up takes time.
Good agencies have optimised processes to onboard into your messaging, business, team, etc within a week or so.

Also, you need a lot of functions to run paid ads. Ad ops, copywriter, design, developer, list builder, tool procurement. Can one person + some tools do this? Definitely. But it's difficult (and costly) to find this person.


---

Just had 15 mins to type this so the answer is a little scattered. I hope it's still helpful.

+1 on what Aniruddh said. If PPC is one of your major marketing channels, you're better off building this function in-house. You'll have much better visibility and control.

I'm biased but we are working with wide range of companies. From early stage to scale ups with more than 10 million performance budget. I would say you need a growth marketer in-house to closely work with an agency but all the operations work should be outsourced. 

For multiple reasons. Dm me or schedule a call here : <http://Tripledart.com|Tripledart.com> I can walk you through the details. 

For ex: companies have more budget are now moving to an agency model. 

+1 to what Aniruddh had suggested. It totally makes sense to build an in-house team if PPC is one of your major marketing channels. However, building an in-house team is directly proportional to the time incurred! 

Let's say, PPC is your primary marketing channel, building a strong team, identifying the right approach, followed by developing a muscle memory around it would atleast cost you two quarters. That definitely sounds alarming, but an alternate approach to this could be, having a dedicated Performance marketer in-house and collaborating with an external agency. In this case, you have someone from your end who's communicating and monitoring the strategies and experiments tried and tested by the agency for your company. 

Once the PM metrics are set in a quarter or so, you can probably think of hiring an extended team since your sole PM resource is already well-acquainted with how the funnel works and which channel is ideal to reach your ICPs. 

This would result in a cost-efficient yet steady approach towards building a high-performing PPC strategy as well as developing an in-house team.

I'm from <http://tripledart.com|tripledart.com> as well and would love to connect in case you need additional insights or help at this. Thanks! 

<@U02TTEFFU6B> and <@U033RUXVCAY> Yep, please. B2B SaaS. We are a platform that helps manage in-field resources. Think sales, delivery, etc.

Hey <@U02USELSBRT> thanks for your detailed response. We haven't yet put in any efforts towards PPC/paid campaigns. We are an early stage start-up and all our efforts/leads have been organic. We now want to explore a few paid avenues, see how it can work for us. Growing the team right now is a bit difficult and hence wanted to understand if PPC can help us. If we can get some quality leads via paid campaigns, we can save on conferences, which makes a huge dent in the budget.

Hi <@U031NC9B67L> and <@U032SJN3W49> happy to connect 1-1 to discuss this in detail.

Thanks <@U033QDFML74>. It's not a major mktg channel but I see your point.

Thanks <@U0316K76612> for your detailed response. It certainly puts things into perspective. Like you said we need to go live fast and we don't have that expertise in-house so an agency might be a good go to. I'll surely check out Spear Growth.

You can start with 4 buckets - demographics ( based on your ICP ), website behaviours, product engagements and spam/junk detection. Then list down all the parameters and score points on them.

Run the model for your historic inbound leads(last quarter) and find out the threshold score. 

How I did is plotting out histograms of scores for inbound leads and the range of scores for leads which move to qualified opportunities or customers. You would get a range of good scores.


Once the model is tested, you can go ahead and implement it for new leads

Made this some time back. Start from ICP. <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1im159DaOrYZ33A-Z7ZJQKVwm9nFzLwnO/edit?usp=sharing&amp;ouid=111397350147234351802&amp;rtpof=true&amp;sd=true>

Instructions for Lead Scoring Template Guide.pdf

The-Definitive-Guide-to-Lead-Scoring-Marketo.pdf

Excellent guide from Adobe for beginners (esp Page 15 onwards which has some helpful templates)

Another crazy rersource is from Breadcrumb - see this <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IPObCR7go1QoMrvPBW7aWMIQZAr5OlPM/edit?usp=sharing&amp;ouid=113468453154769183577&amp;rtpof=true&amp;sd=true|worksheet template> and guide for it attached as well.

Enjoy!

Here's something which I use personally:

Lead scoring can happen on 4 dimensions (with each dimension holding multiple sub-factors each having their own weights):

• demographic (job function, seniority, age)
• firmographic (country, company size, industry, revenue, tech stack)
• intent (what are they searching for, what are they reading)
• behavioral (time spent on site, pageviews, content downloaded, product features used, no. of logins)
All 4 are important. Internally for your business decide which dimensions and sub-factors are most important and decide your hierarchy and weightage for each sub-factor. Basically you can come up with your own formula of when to "qualify" a lead to send to sales.

<@U031KD0PNTX>: You can link, Google Studio, it will let you know which search term triggered the keyword along with the individual metrics.

What are some of the best Ad headlines you've ever seen with offers mentioned?

Image from iOS.jpg

haven't faced this issue. try removing the connection and adding it back again. this time just connect GA from GAds.

If you have just added the goal in GA, you would need to wait for about 6-24 hours for that goal to appear in GAds.

Yes tried reconnecting and it was created 24hours back. Let me wait for one more day! 

Thanks Aniruddh and Chinmay 

If people download the extension, aren't they signing up to your tool from the extension?

having a specific landing page for the campaign would be the easiest way. It will give you the chance to pre-sell the addon before they download.

<@U02UJBF2Y4C>: They would need to sign up, but we won’t be able to differentiate if the traffic came organically or through our paid campaigns.

<@U031KD0PNTX>: Yeah, the only caveat is that it people might drop and after clicking also they might change the mind and not download so tracking that is a challenge

No direct way afaik, but here's what you can do:

• send people to a landing page, assign them a UUID for those who click to go to the chrome extension
• let people signup on chrome extension
• upon signup on chrome extension, trigger a thank you page event and track it using GTM/GAds
• you will have all people who clicked on the landing page and who completed the journey in chrome extension
run this for two weeks and figure out which campaigns are performing the best and pause the rest, then remove this LP step in between and directly send them to chrome extension page.

You could also use a URL shortening service like Bitly and use a branded short URL

what do they sell? largely accounts get suspended for only two reasons: inappropriate ads/LP content or financial frauds.

It is AI based SEO optimised content creator.
Ads and LP content is the same as that is in Google not sure exactly what is the issue with Bing

Google and Bing are two separate companies. They can have different policies and workflows, so don't get too surprised by one not following the other. Even in Google sometimes the ads get approved by mistake and sometimes same ads will get disapproved if you upload again/in a different campaign.

have you checked the page for plagiarised content?

Yes , we have checked the page for plagiarism, 30% of it is from our main website, rest is all fine.

Are you using Top up corporate cards for payments like volopay, Revolut or monzo . the acccounts using these  corporate top up cards are getting banned



:point_down::skin-tone-3:Downsides of Performance Max Campaigns?

1. Little or no insights and less control : there is very little insight into how the budget is allocated. Both on the different channels, or on the type of visitors (prospecting vs remarketing).
1. Since Performance Max covers a much wider range of ads, launching it can have a big impact on your existing campaigns.
If you’re not paying close attention, it will cannibalize some of your other campaigns ( check the image ref attached) 

1. No access via Google Ads editor
1. You can’t negative keywords directly from
The portal but you can check with google ads support to add negatives. I guess google team is working on account level negatives for pMax and it’ll be launched soon. 

:male-technologist::skin-tone-2:Optimisation Tactics 

1. If you don’t add a video to your asset group, Google will automatically generate them. So pls make sure to add one yourself.
2.Select your audience signal google only use this as a jumpstart to understand what your audience looks like. 

1. Try an average daily budget of 3 times of your CPA( cost/conv) PMax works best with high volumes ( impressions, reach etc) 
1. Final Url Expansion: there are three options url a) url expansion ON, exclusion off b)  url expansion ON, with exclusions 
c) URL expansion OFF 

Make sure to exclude your careers page, about us etc when url expansion is on. 

1. Conversion action: leverage goals deep in the funnel that has sufficient frequency. (Mqls &gt; leads). That too with only one conversion action
1. Bidding strategy: also Try value based bidding instead of conversion based bidding. Change it TROAS. Create a new portfolio strategy
 Enter a value as a percentage using this formula: Conversion value ÷ ad spend x 100% = target ROAS percentage

For example, if our goal is to get an average of $2000 in SQL for each $1000 you spend on ads, your target ROAS would be 200%.

1. If you’re just starting out, or you’re spending less than $10k/mo, stay away from Performance Max. You need to take more control over where your ads appear. 
Hope this helps! 


I have tried for LinkedIn groups. Had to run two phantoms in this case - 1. Download Member data of the group 2. Send them invites

Not sure how it would work for Facebook

I don’t remember the last time I looked at quality score because it has nothing to do with quality for a business.

High quality score doesn’t mean my leads are higher quality, doesn’t mean traffic is higher quality, doesn’t mean prospects have higher intent to convert, and it definitely doesn’t mean I have a higher chance of making money. 

It does mean we have checked off some vanity metrics boxes that have nothing to do with a business’s bottom line.

So I would recommend to not worry much on Qs improvements 


Quality score for competitor ads will never be good.

you should be still getting anything between 4-6%

Think of targeting competitor keywords as more of a brand placement exercise

I sort of agree to this - however have seen deals from these campaigns progress faster

Yes conversion rate is better, but CTR and clicks will be low

<@U038L2K4R08> great comments. However, if you could reply in threads, would keep the archiving better for future ref.

<@U0359QY2UN7>, few of our Shopify customers have solved the growth problem with a combination of advertisements for custom audiences on GA and FB and cold email.

They create narrow segments that they can reach out with segment specific messaging. For instance - stores that came online in Feb 2022. Or, activewear stores that are advertising on social media.

Stop thinking that

Running Google Ad = Getting guarenteed conversions

Why should they convert from you? Because you have a good landing page?

Think about what a customer would do. 

1. Search on Google
2. Ooh your ad pops up, but so does your competition
3. Out of every 100 pple searching you het 8 clicks
4. They check you out
5. Why would they risk their shopify performance on an app they never heard about
6. So they leave your website and check out informational blogs , they ask for references
7. You need to reach these people over multiple poonts of contact, run instagram remarketing, run twitter remarketing, get your posts on top DA publications, do an explainer video, get it shared on linkedin, run a referral growth loop, run youtube campaisgns targeting your brand and your competitir brands and main keywords

Now will this improve your ppc performance immediately? No

1. Person google searches
2. Oh hey i heard about this brand from this blog and ive seen ads about them, lemme check them out
3. Damn their landing page is cool, that means their ligit
4. They ask a few friends about it, they all have heard about them
5. Maybe il give these guys a try, their prices are competitive and seem like they know what they are doing

Any reason why they're looking at just performance marketing folks from SaaS background that also candidates with 2+ years of experience? Lots of performance marketing guys from B2C and other verticals have excellent experience/knowledge of paid media with managing pretty large budgets.

Not sure why <@U030FPEG8R4> I am just trying to help the founders I know. 


Sure sure, of course :slightly_smiling_face:

If the conviction on the ICP &lt;&gt; audience fit is low, don't use that cohort for lookalike.

Well if you are very early in your pixel lifecycyle and dont have any sort of custom audiences generated, then yea you can

I guess, letting the AI decide is what making it work at the moment:stuck_out_tongue:

Which goes against everything i have ever learnt over years of running experiments on this exact same thing.

What has been your findings out of this, i want to apply it other accounts, but it just doesnt make sense anymore