s11s

Sure <@U02PDC6B0HH> :slightly_smiling_face:

so i didnt change keywords being targeted. Instead i removed "similiar to purchases" and changed it to a bunch of interests. Audience size negligbly increased. So does that mean Google's matching algorthim has really gone down?

I don't think the algorithm is worse this year, so this is a tough one :thinking_face:

looks like “similar to purchases” matching limited the algo when compared to their pre-defined interests. Could it be possible that the product is more broad that the algo was not able to find a proper lookalike for it? What category is this in if I may ask?

Hence why i went with similiar to purchase

Are these the people who "make the world a better place"?

Hey Aniket, appreciate your views. If you would answer in the thread above, it helps us collate the replies later for archival purpose.

Thanks again.

Doesn't make too much sense for B2B SaaS. Retargeting is your best use of it. Unless you have large budgets and want to do brand pushes

IMO, the best place to learn is Google's <https://skillshop.exceedlms.com/student/catalog/browse|Skillshop>.

Regarding your second question any answer I provide here would end up being a <#C0318NH5G3C|>. So please take this response with a pinch of salt. (Mods please remove if this violates the self promotion policy)

At Demandbase, <https://www.demandbase.com/solutions/advertising-cloud/|Display advertising> is built core into our ABM product. We have built our own <https://www.demandbase.com/why-demandbase/only-b2b-dsp/|DSP> which is optimised towards B2B.

Display ads conventionally are tailored towards brand awareness. Hence instead of relying on standard metrics like conversion rate, we rely more on stuff like account lift, and reach.

Basically, the ads are tailored based on where the accounts are in your journey stage. So for example, accounts in
• Top of the funnel - share your recent ebook
• Middle of the funnel - invite to your upcoming webinar
• Bottom of the funnel - share your recent Gartner MQ report or something
Again within our customers the success is based on how well they know their ICP, understand the platform, and have engaging content instead of boring titles like {{company_name}} accelerates jargon jargon jargon for business outcomes.

For B2B saas with database and marketing stage based ads targeting

<@U02ULN6EFNV> platforms don't succeed or fail, campaigns do :)

having said that, there are 3 critical factors with any campaign:

• goal/what you optimize for
• audience
• creative
a platform plays the biggest role in audience it can target and how, which is what i believe is the shortcoming on Google display.

In order to succeed with GDN,

• make sure you're not asking for the moon in terms of goal. go for upper funnel over lower funnel or post conversion funnel
• try to augment the native audiences with more data. for example, we tried using clearbit reveal to create industry wise smart lists on google analytics and then imported it back to google ads which worked better than regular remarketing
On the point of where to learn, just pick anywhere and get started. Eventually you would need to learn this from multiple sources to "triangulate" your knowledge.

One of the things that worked for us was dividing website audience into prospects (people who visited high intent pages like demo/ pricing) and suspects (the lurkers who visited other pages). Our goal with prospects was to get them to a demo via social proof ads while with suspects was for them to take the next best action (ebook download/ webinar engagement) so their lead score goes up.

One other thing that has come up is bing display ads (connected to LinkedIn at backend) but we're yet to try that.

wouldn’t target impression share work better in this case?

I mean we are anyways getting 100% impression share

just that the costs of the clicks are so high

You can try Target CPA and see for an week if this lowers down your conversion cost. Meanwhile, I feel targeting 100% impression share always increases cost of conversion. Isn't it?

i would suggest that if impression share is not a problem, focus on improving the quality score. improving quality score will get your cpc down immediately.

if qs is also good and IS is also good and even then the CPC is high, it means that you're operating in a very competitive industry and not much is in your control, just continue what you're doing.

Yes, this is a new ad account, so that hurts our CPC, but these are brand terms

what's your click share? is it also high? if not, i would suggest work with maximize clicks strategy for 2 weeks and see if it changes anything

Yes, actually i think maximize clicks should work here

We would want as many clicks at the cheapest cost

yes and intent is not the problem, so wasted spend would be minimum. you may want to have non-performing website audiences as a negative, if that is an issue? for example in B2B, i would remove recent free trial conversions from my brand campaigns but that may not be an issue with d2c

Is anyone else even bidding for your brand keywords?
Asking since you said you're getting 100% impression share.

If no, why run ads for brand keywords? It may make sense to run them for keywords for which you aren't able to rank organically yet.
Eg: brand alternatives, brand pricing, etc.

If you still want to, run ads at enhanced CPC. You should see very low CPCs.

Yeap, people are running ads for our brand, there are only two direct competitors in the market and both of them are running ads. Impression share wont get affected , 3 ad slots, 3 ads, we will always come first becuase of relevancy.

image.png

This pisses me off. Years back when i just got into performance marketing, when i used to run web traffic campaigns and brand awareness campaigns and shiz and get 0 conversions i couldnt believe that our ads were so bad. They were actually really good. So i installed an ip tracking software on the website, tracked where all the website visitors are. First on lucky orange i noticed that a99% of the users stayed on the page for exactly 7 seconds and performed the same action, when i got the IP report, i saw that the server the traffic was coming from was called "Facebook Ireland" took this up with Facebook support and they said Facebook will not accept the results of third party data. At the end of the day this is just a few ruppees or cents, but in volume its a lot of money Facebook is getting out of this bot nonsense

any kind of education related videos is good for top of the funnel. Moz used to do these whiteboard fridays, a good example of TOF content.

+1 to Aniruddh.
Also for B2C, known faces/influencers recommending product works well for TOF.

For ad campaigns, try something like what click up <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_cf3MSSV9w&amp;list=PLxRzBtka0l4ygCToDMb0ejJ4yChkeSY0X|does>. They hold attention, talks about problems and solutions in unexpected ways!

<@U030L29FSN4> <https://phantombuster.com/phantombuster?category=instagram|Phantombuster> is a free tool that you can try. It is ideal for scraping profiles and other relevant information

I've evaluated Crayon and Klue. There are several others too

Hey Anindya - if you're looking to find out your competitor's social media strategy, their followers' growth &amp; compare your account with them - you can have a look at <https://keyhole.co/competitive-analysis/>

P.S. I work with Keyhole.

<http://Competitors.app|Competitors.app> is a decent option. It can track more than social. For social only, there are plenty like Simplify360, Meltwater, Brandwatch 

Talkwalker is great too. I use the free version.

chek out sparktoro as well. it is a powerful tool.

<@U03AHQURB98>  For LinkedIn we can directly open the competitor LinkedIn page and check the activities including the ads. Is that any specific channel you are asking for?

We are using that <@U02UPBP2012>. But that's only 10! Also we're looking for a platform where we can track cross channel too!

Does anyone have a recommendation for a vendor / agency that can make Google Ad payments on our behalf. Need some urgent recommendations here.
Thanks in advance.

Clearbit can work for US audience but still the match rates are relatively low. You may try using Metadata if you want to improve match rates.

Overall, don't recommend using Job targeting for facebook, why not try Linkedin instead?

Basically, using Linkedin targeting on FB and GDN

Ganapathy, Vajra Global - <tel:+91 90940 33355|+91 90940 33355>

Hey <@U03BZJ0KK1R>,

We (<https://speargrowth.com|Spear Growth>) specialise in B2B SaaS Ads.

DMing you to schedule a call to see if this would be a good fit.

<https://clutch.co/profile/spear-growth|Link to verified reviews>.

Ishaan and co are great! Would recommend them every time

<tel:+917045657089|+91 70456 57089>

Bhumish

<@U03BZJ0KK1R> any specific requirement? 

<@U03BZJ0KK1R> Both <@U0316K76612> and <@U031NC9B67L> are good. You don't need an agency to do retargeting. Display and ABM? What do you mean by ABM? Manage display on ABM platform? If you want to do display ads using platforms like Rollworks or 6 Sense, still you don't need an agency. Hire for search and LinkedIn.

Thanks <@U02VBQCQ7EG> for recs. We are working with kinjal and team for more than 6 months now for a different project. She know our process and structures better :slightly_smiling_face:

Image from iOS.jpg

Dear startup marketers how much are you burning on IPL ads? 

Screen Shot 2022-04-20 at 10.44.01.png

try to remove GA4 from your tag manager and then re-install again, then wait for  a few days

i'm not sure if anyone can help you here. it is something you need to test and see if it fits your business.

try both models for 2 weeks each and see which one has a better correlation to actual conversions.

Spend X amount for 2 weeks,

Model 1 = 100 conversions
Model 2 = 90 conversions

now plot a graph of daily spends vs conversions and look at correlation line.

the two people i was hoping to get a response responded. i was not even sure how "time decay attribution" model worked for sure.

time decay is simply a fancy way to say that the model assigns most importance to first touch, then slightly less to second touch, even lesser to third touch and so on. whereas last touch is 100% on the last touchpoint.

This is not a job posting. It's more  of mentorship.

We're managing that for a couple of our clients. I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

My profile: <http://linkedin.com/in/ishaan-shakunt|linkedin.com/in/ishaan-shakunt>

Hey <@U0316K76612>  Would love to pick your brain. Do you mind me DMing you?

i like the 'successfully' part, you immediately disqualified me from answering :smile:

Glad to have company, I have been trying and failing at Reddit ads everytime I start a new role!

Okay here is my experience. I've parallelly tried Reddit ads for 3 personas HRs, Designers, app dev and engineers. 

Reddit launched a feature to place our ads in between conversations. We picked the right sub topics and served this ads for few months. Engineers and designer personas were working way better than HR. Then went Ahrefs and checked traffic movements for the sub reddits we are targeting. Then based on keywords ranking for these subReddits seperated the adsets and increased budget. 

And also for one event we ran sub Reddit take over on us and Uk. Which is so cheap compared to Twitter and YouTube take over. Got some really good visits for lesser cpm. 


Nice! How did you verify the traffic quality?

It's simple right - you know the intent behind all these keywords. Checking website behaviour you can estimate the quality of the traffic  

Asked because Reddit seems like a demand gen channel.

Since there attributable conversions is less likely, there is a high chance that the audience coming in are not in our ICP.

It's easier to see on LinkedIn because they give audience analytics and job titles. Also, you can confirm the same by running lead gen ads and checking a few individual accounts. For larger companies, something like a ZoomInfo will alread have WebSights data to validate the same but it's only accurate for NA style regions.

I was just curious how you were validating the same for reddit.

Or were you able to drive conversions directly from reddit ads?

I consider Quora and Reddit is another intent channels. You'll search for something and end up checking Reddit and Quora based on your searches. These two channels are very popular for user generated content. 

So for ex if you a user searches x + Reddit, x + Quora then the user likely wanted to check user generated content. So we will be targeting more sub Reddits related to customer support queries. 

You can find details about a sub Reddit in ahrefs.( what keywords this sub Reddit is ranking for, how many monthly active sessions, which country they are ranking for etc) based on which we can tweaks.

We are getting direct conversions from Reddit and Quora. Only con is it's volatile and has volume issues. Other than that if you have good marketing budget adding Reddit and Quora to the mix Is always a good option. 

Nice! Thanks for letting me know.

We'll test Quora and Reddit for direction conversions as well.

Primer <@U03158A1WPK> 

I used metadata <@U02V5HU4EP2> - i personally like their support and operations. They can also help you with audience building / campaign optimisations etc. 

If you are comparing it with clearbit I can def vouch for metadata. 

We are partners with Primer. I think they are much cheaper and more effective than Metadata on Audience building. They don't do campaign management.

Dei Google - <https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ferenczkaszoni_seo-passiveincome-seoinspiration-activity-6919641166946660353-_sno/>

Surfside PPC, Paid Media Pros.

Not sure about the courses, but these channels got some good content on individual topics and practical explanations.

If you have it till the install level you simply need to connect your internal systems to pass your user id/account id and link it to the corresponding gclid. That should be simple or maybe I'm misunderstanding your question.

Yes. Exactly. That's what we need to do.

What I looking for is a resource that can help me spec it out clearly for developers ( also, something that I can share with them if needed)

What you need to do is to create a uuid that you assign to each cookie/user. All gclids are stored under this cookie. Once this anonymous user signs up, you now attach an account id to this uuid. For this you need to be able to pass information between two domains: <http://abc.com|abc.com> and <http://app.abc.com|app.abc.com>. You also need to update your cookie preferences and take user permission to be gdpr compliant (another discussion altogether). 
Anyways, once you have a table which has these columns: UUID, gclid, click timestamp, click url, form submit timestamp, user email, account id. 

You then need to join this table with your table which contains product analytics. Aim to get the table which has these columns: account id, user email, payment status, is_customer

Once you have these two tables simple join them to get a unified view. You would need to think of scenarios where multiple users maybe linked to the same account id and vice versa, for your attribution calculations.

Share this with your developers, most developers I share this with get what I mean. :sweat_smile:

This is super helpful, bud. Thanks so much

Follow measureschool YouTube channel for all your tracking related queries.  

In my experience, both Capterra/Getapp are fairly consistent, but not exactly scalable (listing category might be a factor here). Lead quality is better, but more expensive than paid search.

Used it. Primarily works for US &amp; EU - for MEA &amp; APAC not that well. Like <@U02UMB0T7BM> said, quality good, expensive, and not a scalable channel. If you are looking at US as a market, good channel to have in your mix.

Thanks <@U02UMB0T7BM> <@U02PDC4883V> <@U039KP64KQQ> <@U030SS7KNHH> - so our target market is US, and our ACV (Annual Contract Value) is 500 - 2000 USD.

So wondering whether it makes sense for us.

What are other primary PPC channels you'd advice (for a content intelligence SaaS, mostly self serve)? (we're eyeing Quora, Google)

Tx

Start with google ads. Understand your unit economics with few months of running ads. Expand it with Quora and bing ads. Compare cpc differences with capterra and google ads. It's always good to be in capterra and other review channels if you have high competition or low visibility. 

Ankur, try all channels yourself. Every product category is different. Even same product tried different times can yield different results. Even with someone's results you don't know how good was their creative or how accurate was their audience selection or even how well known is their brand. Keep experimenting!

This one can be useful <https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shiyamsunder_ppc-capterra-activity-6900348138297909248-7iMf?utm_source=linkedin_share&amp;utm_medium=ios_app|https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shiyamsunder_ppc-capterra-activity-6900348138297909248-7iMf?utm_source=linkedin_share&amp;utm_medium=ios_app>

If you're looking to run Capterra/G2 ads go through this process:
1. Do they have the right category for what you sell? If it's not the right category, the quality of leads will probably be bad.
2. If they do, check how many reviews your competitors have compared to you. It's always a worth getting more reviews on these sites.
3. Once you have competitive number of reviews (and optimise your profile), you should start seeing organic traffic from them.
4. Check how the organic traffic is converting. Also check their native analytics.
5. If the organic traffic is converting well, it's most probably a good idea to pay for that traffic. ,But you'll still have to see what the CAC is in your case.
Things I've noticed:
1. Click to landing page view ratio is much worse than Google ads. (Use pageviews not clicks when getting a sense of CPCs and CRs)
2. It sometimes has given as as good results as Google ads.
3. If unit economics are working REALLY well for you and there is a high profile visit volume, it may be worth checking out G2s paid audience.
4. In one case we saw 2x CPCs than Google but also 2x CRs with similar lead quality. So the cost was pretty similar to Google.
5. In another case, where the category was just a little off, we only got junk leads.

For making projections for any channel, just estimate CR and CPC however you want. You should be able to estimate CAC using that.

agree with <@U0316K76612> I have been following similar data points/method.  My TG location is also US with similar ACV.

take a test budget like 10% of the total budget approx and run all audiences and creatives in parallel with the same bid stratgies.

after a week, pause all campaigns and compare all metrics: CPC, CTR, CVR, CPL etc. and then decide what you want to keep running and what you want to pause.

no point playing the guessing game. get real numbers

Aniruddh is right, rather than relying on projections, I would also recommend you start the new regions with a test budget and for cpc, provide 50% less average cpc than US regions. On the basis of the results you can increase or decrease the bids and budget.

Some hacks: 

-&gt; Review your competitors' traffic by country using Semrush, and you will gain more insight into the potential of specific countries

-&gt; If your company is organically strong, analyze the region's organic performance in terms of traffic, conversions, and lead quality prior to all these things.

To get to a initial CPL for “mota mota” calculations, consider the lower end of industry benchmark. Like 2% CTR on the ad, 1% conversion on the landing page, avg. CPC shown by keyword planner. Can be done on a excel sheet.

Thanks all for your inputs and help!

I guess the best way (as suggested by most of you) would be to get actual numbers by running a trial ad for a week and making a decision based on that.

<@U033QDFML74> whenever I have been asked to present a rough budget plan this is what I do
1. Google Keyword Planner - Get the volume and bid cost for top 5-10 keywords
2. Assume my bid will be 10% above the bid cost
3. Take industry conversions rate (and dial it down). If industry conv rate is 4% - i would take mine as 3.25% (no specific reason for the delta)
4. Then i get a budget - which is generally approved
5. Then I run the campaigns as suggested by <@U02USELSBRT> and then see data and keep correcting my budget 
Everyone wins :smile:

<@U02ULN6EFNV> not really, campaigns are run regularly.  Ran the last one in April

Update - this is now resolved. Thanks everyone! 

<@U02UMB0T7BM> i have faced this multiple times and got the account activated, let me know if any help needed

<@U039KP64KQQ> thanks Gourav, I'm sorted for now but I'll reach out to you if it gets disabled again :+1:

<@U0318JZUESX> followed all the prompts in settings, appealed the ban, called up support and waited patiently. Took more time than promised but was resolved after all.

The only downside is that facebook now has my driving license :sweat_smile:

<@U03158A1WPK> not sure which policy was violated because Facebook doesn't give out that info

Hey Rohit,

We're a B2B SaaS marketing agency. We help with ads and SEO.

Darwinbox and X0PA are two relevant companies we have/are working with. Our POCs at either of these companies can vouch for our work.

Sending you a DM.

Thanks <@U031YH4D36U>! 

Hello <@U02TTEFFU6B> pls check <http://tripledart.com|tripledart.com> and schedule your convenient time if you are interested. 

Hey Rohit,
Check out - <http://contensify.com|contensify.com>

What does Contensify do ? the link is not working

At Contensify, we help B2B SaaS start-ups and scale-ups with content marketing.
This should work - <https://contensifyhq.com/>

Simplest way without using any additional tools: 
Send them to a dedicated landing page - which may or may not be an exact duplicate of an existing page but it just has a unique URL that you can only get to through this flow.

This way you know if the sign up came from this page it has to be through that ppc campaign

Thanks <@U032MN1BESJ> for the suggestion.

<@U032MN1BESJ> That’s an interesting take on this problem. One confusion I have- people discovering the Shopify app organically on the app store and installing the same will also proceed to the same landing page for the signup process? How do you differentiate the two acquisition segments?

<https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alex-velinov_googleads-ppc-audiences-activity-6930881147526639616-5GiI?utm_source=linkedin_share&amp;utm_medium=member_desktop_web|https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alex-velinov_googleads-ppc-audiences-activity-69308811[…]5GiI?utm_source=linkedin_share&amp;utm_medium=member_desktop_web> - Interesting stuff. This is for App acquisition or for general google display ads as well ? Anyone tried it ? <@U031NC9B67L> <@U0316K76612>