How Melissa Achieved a 154% Increase in Conversions and a 59% Decrease in CPA for Her Client

Episode Description

In this episode of Automation Layering Masterclass, you’ll hear from Melissa Mackey, a renowned B2B PPC expert, and learn how she helped her client achieve a 154% increase in conversions with a 59% decrease in CPA. Melissa goes into great detail and breaks down the process of how she achieved these great results in this episode. Tune in to learn:

• How to target the right audiences in B2B advertising
• How to build audiences based on user behavior
• How to generate higher-quality leads
• How to separate good leads from junk leads

Episode Takeaways

B2B marketers face unique challenges in paid search advertising that their B2C counterparts don’t typically encounter. One of the biggest challenges is distinguishing between corporate clients and consumers. Another is ensuring that you’re optimizing for quality business outcomes rather than just lead volume.

Fred and Melissa talk at length about these challenges and explore practical strategies to tackle them head-on.

1. How to target the right audiences in B2B advertising

One of the core challenges with B2B advertising is distinguishing between business and consumer intent with the same search terms. As Melissa Mackey explains:

“It’s hard when people search, they tell us what they’re looking for, in varying levels of detail, but they don’t tell us anything about who they are. So like you said, we don’t know if they’re a consumer or a business buyer.”

Advertisers can use a mix of strategies to counter this challenge. Some things Melissa recommends are:

• Using your first-party audiences. You can upload your customer or prospect list to Google Ads and then use it for targeting
• Creating audiences through user behavior, especially for products with low awareness or search volume
• Leveraging discovery campaigns to drive leads at a fraction of the cost as compared to search

“Discovery campaigns I think is an often overlooked campaign type. But it can do well not only for driving audiences, which is what we’re talking about in this use case, but it can also drive leads. We also found with using discovery, because the cost per click was so low, 39 cents as compared to $6.85, we got leads at a fraction of the cost that we were getting from search.” says Melissa

• Importing qualified lead data back into Google so that optimization is based on actual business outcomes
• Rethinking form design by adding questions that help you qualify leads better

2. How to build audiences based on user behavior

If you want to proactively build relevant B2B audiences instead of waiting prospects to find your products, especially if they are new or have limited awareness or search volume, its a good idea to think about building audiences through targeted upper funnel content across channels like GDN, YouTube, and discovery campaigns.

“Another way that you can create audiences is just look at your user behavior. So we had a tech client. They had a new product that they launched and it didn’t have any awareness. People weren’t searching for the name of this product. They weren’t even searching for kind of what the product did.

We used upper funnel campaigns to seed an audience and get people to come to some content on the website that talked about this type of product and kind of what the problems were that the product would solve.” shared Melissa

The purpose of such campaigns is not particularly to drive leads but rather to generate some level of awareness. This can help in finding people who are interested in the content around the products you’re offering. You can then use them as an audience in search campaigns and RLSAs.

This approach delivered some solid results for Melissa’s clients.

“We got fantastic results. We had a 154% increase in conversions, which even though volume was very low initially, that was still way beyond what we were expecting to see. We thought we’d maybe get a 50% increase, but 154% was huge. Cost per acquisition dropped by almost 60% and we also got a huge increase in clicks.”

3. How to generate higher quality leads

Form fills are one of the most commonly used lead generation methods in B2B marketing. However, the challenge is in generating high-quality leads that actually convert to meaningful conversions. Too often we see a high volume of form fills that don’t really translate to anything valuable.

“So the way that we’re tracking conversions usually in our search campaigns, and frankly in any of our digital campaigns, is usually a form fill. The challenge with this is that leads don’t equal form fills. Some of them are flat out junk. Somebody might put in Mickey Mouse or just fake information.

Others are consumers. We would see for our B2B, we’d see a lot of students where they were probably doing some kind of a research project. Obviously they’re not going to buy your six figure software.” Melissa explains.

She recommends rethinking the form design and going beyond the notion that forms have to be minimal. You can add strategic qualification fields without making your forms excessively long and ask about the specific problems your audience wants to solve. And if you want to filter out junk leads, something as simple as providing a ‘just browsing’ option can help you save time and separate casual visitors.

Melissa also warns against dismissing leads that use their personal email IDs.

“We’ve had clients come and say, we get rid of all Gmail, Yahoo, anything that’s not a business email address. And we would have to say, you’re probably getting rid of some good leads there. “Even if they fill out a real company and they put a Gmail, so what, that should still be a lead that should still go into your system. Don’t get rid of leads.”

4. How to separate good leads from junk leads

Aside from smarter form design, there are a few other ways you can improve your lead quality.

One of the most effective solutions is to connect your CRM data back to Google Ads.. This allows the algorithm to understand what kind of users actually become high-quality leads and refine audience targeting. Plus you can assign actual value to each lead based on revenue deal or size, allowing Google’s bidding algorithms to bid more for higher value users.

“We set up HubSpot integration for them and started using HubSpot MQLs for smart bidding instead and we found that the MQLs increased by over 50 once we went to this method” said Melissa.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys:  Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Automation Layering Masterclass. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the co-founder and CEO at Optmyzr, and today we have a very special guest. We have Melissa Mackey, who is a B2B PPC expert. She’s been doing this for a long time. She’s met all the challenges,, overcome all the challenges of B2B marketing and and there’s quite a few of those. They’re very different from what you would see in B2C Marketing and PPC.

Let’s welcome Melissa to our episode.

Melissa, let’s bring you in. How are you doing?

Melissa Mackey: I’m doing great. Thanks Fred. It’s good to be here.

Frederick Vallaeys: Good to see you again. We go way back used to hang out in person when more conferences happened that way. Slowly coming back. You recently did an SMX advanced, I think you did, right? Where you talked a little bit about this topic.

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, actually, this was at SMX Next.

Frederick Vallaeys: SMX Next. There you go. So yeah, but thanks for joining us.

So Automation Layering Masterclass, to really set the stage really quickly for first time viewers— Automation layering is basically this concept that Google has really sophisticated AI machine learning technologies.

But then we as marketers, we often want more control, right? We don’t like the black box just telling the machine what to do, and oftentimes there’s so much we know about our businesses that if we could just communicate that to the very smart machines from Google. Those machines would be able to do a slightly better job.

And that’s really what automation layering is about. It’s about finding tools and technology and automations that you control that get the machines to do better. And I think what you’re coming to us with today are two ways to use automation layering.

So why don’t we jump into the first one and one big challenge in B2B marketing is when you have a keyword like printers, how do you know if you have a corporate client for that?

Or if it’s just some random person looking to buy a printer for their kid who needs to print out some homework? So it’s about audiences, right? So tell us a bit about the challenge, Melissa.

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, absolutely Fred. So you summed it up really well. It’s hard when people search, they tell us what they’re looking for, in varying levels of detail, but they don’t tell us anything about who they are.

So like you said, we don’t know if they’re a consumer or a business buyer. And so the way that you find that out is via audiences. Audiences are an invaluable signal that helps to tell the engine who is searching, a little bit more about them than just the keyword. And it’s a very important signal.

If you’re not using audiences right now, you absolutely need to be, especially for B2B. And so there’s a couple different ways that you can use audiences. The first one is first party audiences, and that’s an obvious one, right? You have a customer list or a prospect list, and you can upload that to Google ads and then start using that for targeting.

That’s an obvious one. It’s not one that a lot of businesses are utilizing. So either they don’t have the audiences available or they don’t have them in a way that they can upload them or they don’t have enough. I remember having a client saying, yeah, we’ve got a great list. We’ve got 50 people on it, and unfortunately that’s just too small to use for any kind of a search audience.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so then Google has minimum audience sizes. Do you know what those numbers are?

Melissa Mackey: They say a thousand, but then they also told us you really need 20,000 people to have a good audience. And the reason for that is the match rate match rates for B2B are around 30 to 40%.

And you need to have some kind of a critical mass. If you have only a thousand people, you can use the audience, but you’re not gonna get any traction on it. It’s just not gonna be worth it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And so say that you do have at least a decent number of members on the audience list. What does the technology look like?

Are we talking about something as simple as a MailChimp subscription list that you can somehow then import into Google and how would that sort of thing work?

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, so you can do that if you have emails. It can be that simple, just something that you upload. A better solution is to use like a LiveRamp or an Adobe Audience manager or one of these technologies. A DMP basically that will connect.

And the great thing about using one of those is that then it can be updated automatically. So if your audience updates on your end, it will push it to Google ads and update that automatically. Whereas a static list, that’s the list, and as soon as it’s out of date, you’ve gotta re-upload a new one. So it’s better to use some kind of a connector.

Frederick Vallaeys: So using a DMP now, what kind of are, what are the going rates these days for Adobe and LiveRamp?

Melissa Mackey: Not cheap. I don’t know off the top of my head.

Frederick Vallaeys: But that’s kind why I wanted to point it out. Yeah. And again, we’re talking about B2B, so you probably have the budgets to pay for these things, but if you don’t you can always do that simpler solution, which is whatever internal system you have.

Go through Zapier, for example. They can do live updates. Optmyzr even has some capabilities of taking Google sheets and connecting those into Google. So there’s a spectrum of basically automation layers here that you can use. So that was the simple thing, right?

And I think you wanted to go for a more sophisticated one, so let’s go there.

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, absolutely. So it, failing, having first party audiences, another way that you can create audiences is just look at your user behavior. So we had a tech client. They had a new product that they launched and it didn’t have any awareness.

People weren’t searching for the name of this product. They weren’t even searching for kind of what the product did. Search volume was very low. We just weren’t getting any traction on it. And so what we did is we used upper funnel campaigns to seed an audience and get people to come to some content on the website that talked about this type of product and kind of what the problems were that the product would solve.

So we used Google Display, we used YouTube, we used Discovery. Those are tactics that a lot of B2B advertisers shy away from. They say we don’t get any leads from Google Display. We don’t wanna use it. The purpose of this particular effort wasn’t to drive leads. It was to generate some awareness and really create these audiences so that we could find people who were interested in this content around the product, and then we could use that as an audience, not only for observation in our search campaigns, but also for RLSA because it became quite a large audience.

A lot of people were interacting with this content. They were interacting with the YouTube campaigns, and then that became an audience that we could target with RLSA very successfully.

Frederick Vallaeys: So then in YouTube, that’s built in, right? So if you can go to Google and say, build an audience of people who’ve watched my channel or watched certain videos. So that’s no extra work other than going into Google and saying, this is an audience that I wanna have.

When it comes to Google display, what did that look like? Did people have to come to the content you were producing or were you building lists off of people who had seen the ad? How do you go about that?

Melissa Mackey: We were building lists off of people who came to the site, so it was anybody who landed on this particular page. And so that could have been people who came to the page from anywhere really not just GDN. But frankly, most of the traffic was coming from GDN because it wasn’t getting a lot of traffic from anywhere else.

Frederick Vallaeys: Organic takes a little bit longer, right? Which is exactly why we’re doing ads because we wanna build these audiences quickly. We don’t wanna wait three months for the SEO efforts to to pick up. Just to be clear here, but I guess you were then driving people to white papers, eBooks, sort of things that typically a business audience would care about, but not a consumer audience and that’s how you then knew this was a business audience?

Melissa Mackey: Exactly. So it was a very specific piece of content that addressed the business use case for it. If consumers came there, they were very unlikely to come there, first of all. And second of all, they were not likely to sign up for the download that they were offering or watch the video. So we did have a video that kind of explained what the product was and we had, I think it was 75%, they had watched 75% of the video.

So it was a pretty long, it wasn’t just somebody who watched a few seconds, they had to invest several minutes in watching. And that’s another way to weed out people, casual observers who might watch five seconds of a video, but then say, oh, this isn’t for me.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s, I guess then where you strike the balance between specificity and volume.

So if somebody watched for five seconds, they’re sort of interested and that’s how you get higher volumes. So that’s enough list for Google. But if you have huge numbers of audience coming to that, then of course it can be a little bit more conservative and say, oh, they have to watch 75% of the video right before we wanna target to them.

And like cost wise I’m guessing obviously Google displays a bit cheaper than search. I’m hoping. So what were we looking at there?

Melissa Mackey: It was low, it was just a few thousand dollars. It was not a large investment. And I think people think that they have to spend, five or six figures on these campaigns, and that’s really not true.

Now, this was an enterprise client and a few thousand dollars might be a lot for some advertisers. But again, when we’re talking B2B, a lot of times there are large budgets and these clients are also spending a lot of money in other types of channels that are not nearly as targeted, frankly, as search and YouTube.

So it wasn’t difficult to talk them into this test. This was a test that we did for them. But because CPCs are so low, you can generate a lot of traffic and cost per view and YouTube was like 15 cents. So it’s very affordable, very low cost.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then you take the holistic view on the results, right?

Obviously whatever your cost per lead down the line is, that is now incremented because you’re spending some money building these audience lists, right? But that’s still a whole lot cheaper than paying like a hundred dollars or $200 cost per acquisition on someone who ends up being a consumer who’s not your right audience.

Melissa Mackey: Exactly. It really pays off. And so you do have to look at it holistically. Don’t silo your results into, GDN had this CPA and YouTube had this CPA, you’ve gotta look at it as a whole for sure.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Okay, so that’s an awesome solution to hone in on a business audience. What kind of results were you seeing from this?

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, so we got fantastic results. We had a 154% increase in conversions, which even though volume was very low initially, that was still way beyond what we were expecting to see. We thought we’d maybe get a 50% increase, but 154% was huge. Cost per acquisition dropped by almost 60% and we also got a huge increase in clicks.

Now this visual on the screen here, I wanna call this out ‘cause I mentioned we use discovery campaigns. Discovery campaigns I think is an often overlooked campaign type. But it can do well not only for driving audiences, which is what we’re talking about in this use case, but it can also drive leads.

So we found with using discovery, because the cost per click was so low, 39 cents as compared to $6.85, we got leads at a fraction of the cost that we were getting from search. So discovery is a great hybrid way to not only get a lot of volume to drive an audience, but also to actually drive leads. So I look at it as like a mid funnel.

GDN and YouTube are more just pure awareness. Discovery’s kind of in the middle. And then search obviously is search. But this was also an unexpected result. Frankly, we hadn’t done a lot of discovery and we’re really pleased with it and started doing a lot more after we saw these results.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s amazing. It’s like the gravy, right? So you’re using this to build audiences, and then hey, if you put a lead gen form on it, some people will actually still fill that out. That’s extra. Besides Google, so we’ve talked about Google Display discovery, YouTube.

Obviously we’re not limited to just this, right? If you wanna go to Microsoft and take advantage of their LinkedIn audiences, which are very, can be very specific to B2B. You can still build cookie lists based off of that, you can still bring that to other ad platforms. Is that something that you would recommend people do as well?

Melissa Mackey: Absolutely should use Microsoft. And we didn’t in this case, but we have done that many times. And another thing you can do is social with LinkedIn, like you mentioned LinkedIn with Microsoft, or you could just do a pure LinkedIn campaign as well. A lot of options for targeting B2B audiences there.

And LinkedIn tends to be a little pricey on a cost per click basis, so you have to weigh that out, but it’s really the best way to drive B2B leads when you’re looking at social for sure.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And that’s actually interesting because we have looked at LinkedIn as well, but when we saw it as an audience building mechanism, we found it to be too expensive because those CPCs were so high. Then we looked at LinkedIn more as like lower funnel, the lead gen portion. But then you get your cheaper social networks where you get clicks for a couple of cents. If that makes sense from an audience perspective, I thought.

Melissa Mackey: Yep, definitely.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. That’s, problem number one with a beautiful solution for number one. So how do you find that B2B audience? So let’s shift here into the second thing that you found great ways to address. But you got people filling out your lead forms, ou got all these leads coming in and then nobody’s buying from you because the leads suck. You bought the cheapest leads, but not necessarily the best ones. So lead quality, let’s talk about that. What sort of challenges have you faced with lead quality?

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, absolutely. So lead quality, the challenge with this is that leads don’t equal form fills. So the way that we’re tracking conversions usually in our search campaigns, and frankly in any of our digital campaigns, is usually a form fill. So it could be, filling out a form to download a white paper or sign up for a trial or whatever it is. And as soon as you get to that thank you page, or click that submit button, there’s your conversion, and now that’s what all your smart bidding is focused on all of your, conversion based bid strategies, et cetera.

The problem is not all those form fills end up becoming leads. So some of them are flat out junk, it’s somebody put in Mickey Mouse or just fake information. Others are consumers. We would see for our B2B, we’d see a lot of students where they were probably doing some kind of a research project and they wanted to use this asset that you had a white paper or whatever to help them with their project. I don’t know why that’s my guess is why students would fill forms out, but obviously they’re not going to buy your six figure software.

And then a fraction of them are actually businesses looking for leads. And so these leads all go into a CRM system. The junk ones are scrubbed out and the real ones actually go in and become either an MQL or an SQL or whatever your business calls that. The problem is Google Ads doesn’t know unless you do some things, Google Ads doesn’t know how many form fills actually became leads, and so you could be optimizing for something that got a lot of form fills and they were all junk.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Huge problem there. Mickey Mouse is filling out this form so I get it. Mickey Mouse is probably not gonna buy your stuff, right?

But one thing I’ve always been curious about is if you work for a big corporation, so I used to work for Google, you’ve worked for a number of bigger companies —when someone selling a software sees those leads coming in, it just starts salivating, right?

Your people then use their personal Gmail address. Because I get the sense that sometimes you look at Gmail addresses and Yahoo address and you’re like, ah, that’s just spam. That’s never gonna lead to anything. But at some level it’s like that’s some of your most valuable leads are probably hiding within that.

But how do you read the chaff out from the, or the wheat from the chaff?

Melissa Mackey: Yeah. That’s a conversation that we’ve had with so many clients where we’ve had clients come and say, we get rid of all Gmail, Yahoo, anything that’s not a business email address. And we would have to say, you’re probably getting rid of some good leads there.

You need to find a different way to follow up with people, whether it’s asking additional questions on your form where only a serious buyer would answer it a certain way. We used to say forms should be as short as possible. Name and email address. Boom. That’s because you wanted to get as many submissions as possible.

I think that thinking has changed. Because it’s too hard to know enough about the person based on name and email address and how serious they are. And especially when it, when things like smart bidding depends on that. You wanna make sure that enough about the prospect, so you could ask something like company name.

So even if they fill out a real company and they put a Gmail, so what, that should still be a lead that should still go into your system. Don’t get rid of leads. So it’s a little bit of a balancing act for sure.

Frederick Vallaeys: And people should hire you if they want the real gold here. But is there another little nugget of a question that’s not pushing so much towards what is your company, but like in a roundabout way, getting a qualifying a lead.

Melissa Mackey: Some will ask specifics about, what kind of problem are you trying to solve? When it comes to, what’s the use case for our software that you need it for? Others will ask things like, how soon do you need a solution? And so one of the answers is always, I’m just browsing, and then another answer is immediately or within the next 90 days.

And that kind of helps anybody who really is just browsing is probably gonna choose just browsing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, no, that, that’s another point. Maybe a separate point, but I’ll be looking for a piece of software and like I’m a decision maker within the company. And then it’s now you gotta fill out the form and then you gotta wait for someone to call you.

And I’m like, I need it like today. Yeah. Lemme sign up. Where do I put my credit card? So yeah. You should ask that question, but then you should also act on it, right? If they need it now, have your sales team immediately handle that and not in a 15 minute exploration call, but listen, I just wanna buy this thing.

Melissa Mackey: Exactly and so many companies do this badly.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And also if you have a good solution and you are a market leader, then assume that you often don’t have to do the selling, right? People have heard about you, they’ve talked to their friends. They know what they’re gonna get. They know what the pricing is gonna be, right?

Make it easy for them to circumvent your sales team and directly pay you. But yeah, we’re talking about the lead quality then, right? And you were alluding to a couple of ways that you can figure out which are better leads.

But what is the next step then, as far as getting this back into Google and the automation layer what’s that here?

Melissa Mackey: Absolutely. So the best solution that we’ve found is to import your data from your CRM back into Google Ads. So Google Ads has connectors for all the popular CRMs.

Some of them are direct if use Salesforce or HubSpot. There’s a direct integration. And this is really very simple. You can take about 15, 20 minutes and have this set up literally. If you know how to do it, it can be very quick. They also support with Zapier pretty much every other CRM that’s out there. There’s hundreds of these.

Frederick Vallaeys: So somebody fills out the lead form that goes into your CRM. And then you are saying like, depending on the stage of the qualification that’s happened that’s what you are importing back into Google.

What do you like to import? Is it sales qualified? Marketing Qualified

Melissa Mackey: As much as you can. Yeah. I like to do whatever the next step is. So it’s usually MQL. And the reason that you want to do the next, the very next step is to give enough data for smart bidding. If you’re waiting till SQLs or until closed leads, for example, you may be waiting a long time.

So this visual shows, this is from SA 360, but the process is very similar in Google Ads. Once you get these imported, you can then use this for smart bidding, like I said. This was from a client who they called their MQLs respondents. But it was basically an MQL and this was from Salesforce.

And again, if you have enough of these leads coming in which Google says 20 in a month. And that was actually the number that we found was about right, that if you had at least 20 leads 20 respondents, MQLs, whatever you call it, you can use that to drive your smart bidding. And so this is an example where we did target CPA based on not Google’s form fills conversions but actual MQLs in the client system. And so that’s a really important distinction to make because again, depending on how many of these form fills you’re getting that aren’t real leads in your system of truth, you might be optimizing for something where Google thinks you’re getting a lot and you’re really not getting a lot.

I have seen campaigns where Google shows a hundred conversions and one MQL and then another campaign that shows 25 conversions and 20 MQLs So you can see easily that the campaign that might be preferred with one metric is really the wrong one.

Frederick Vallaeys: So yeah, communicate your business truth to Google so that exactly their automation can help you do what you do best.

And the automation layer here is obviously the fact that you can’t be going into Google and manually updating this. So you have to have these connectors, you have to plug in your software, your CRM software to constantly feed into Google. Now I’ve got a couple of fairly specific questions. I love this topic.

But okay, so you go from communicating form fills as your conversion, and in the example you gave, you get a hundred form fills, but only one of those is really a qualified lead. Okay. So there’s one technique would be to say I know that I only have a 1% conversion rate from form fill to whatever I want to happen next. So I’m just gonna modify my cost per acquisition target to take that into account. And that sorta achieves the same thing as you instead communicating and saying I only had one conversion, but I’m willing to pay a hundred times as much for that conversion. Has that made a difference or how do you think about scenario A modifying the CPA versus modifying what you report as a conversion scenario?

Melissa Mackey: Scenario A, if you can’t figure out how to get your CRM leads into, or if you’re using another channel that doesn’t support these imports, that is a decent solution. I found it to be pretty inaccurate. The numbers can change and so if you’re having to back into something, it requires you to really stay on top of it.

And you’re basically, now you’re basically doing manual bidding, right? ‘cause you’re having to look at what you’re getting, how are your results going? If the percentages change or your CPA goals change, you’ve gotta go in and manually make sure you’re updating that. Whereas if you’re importing the data, it does it automatically. So there, there’s a time issue.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. And then all the time that we’re wasting, manually adjusting bids, like we’re not being strategic. The other thing I think is that the more that you can communicate your truth to Google, their machine learning systems will now actually start figuring out what is it about this one that’s different from the 99 others?

And over time it can actually start learning and say, oh, maybe it’s a regional thing, maybe it’s a time of day thing. Maybe there’s some audience component that we, ourselves don’t have, but Google has all this data. So it can start to see beyond that, it can learn. And then that’s really where we wanna push the system to.

So I agree with you. I think you should communicate the actual conversion. Now the next question then is, you are on board, you’ve listened to this session, you’re gonna do this. But how do you go from the old way where you said, I’m only willing to pay $10 CPA because I’ve been communicating the wrong thing to now I’m willing to pay a thousand dollars CPA because I’m communicating my actual conversions.

That seems like it would shock the system a little bit. So how have you, in your experience, made that transition from communicating one type of conversion to another one and adjusting the targets along the way?

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, so there’s a couple ways to do it. You can go cold turkey and say, all right, we’re just gonna switch it from one to the other.

And there will be a brief learning period where the numbers are crazy, but I’ve found it only takes a week or two if you have sufficient volume. It doesn’t take that long. And so if you as the advertiser or your client, if you’re an agency, has a little bit of tolerance for some volatility for a short period of time, you can just flip that switch.

If you don’t wanna do that, or if you don’t think you have the volume, you can just switch it to manual bidding again for a short period of time to kind of reboot the system, if you will. And then turn it to automation with your new goals, with the new conversion action that you’re tracking.

And I’ve done it both ways and it has worked both ways, like I said, just with some volatility, if you’re doing the cold turkey method. But it honestly, I found it doesn’t last that long unless your data volume is just so low and then it’s probably gonna be a challenge either way.

Frederick Vallaeys: Data freshness. So that’s the other question that I have, right? So if you look at an MQL, you’re fairly quickly able to establish that someone who filled out a form was an MQL or SQL that takes longer, actually buying something that takes even longer.

So the question then becomes, would you communicate something that happened two weeks after the fact, 30 days after the fact? Would you keep communicating that back to Google? And have you found that there’s some sort of a cutoff point at which it’s just too late to tell Google something changed. And the reason I find this question interesting is that Google actually sets an update window that’s quite long. I believe it’s 90 days on updating conversions. It’s 55 days when it comes to conversion value for retailers. So the assumption therein would lie that I can tell you 90 days after the fact that this person who I said was a lead, ‘cause they filled out the form, actually wasn’t a good quality lead because they fell out, they were closed, lost in my CRM system, right?

But then Google says anything that happens after two days, like really, it’s not gonna matter that much to the bidding system. So I’m really curious what your experience has been when it comes to kinda like the timing of updating Google about what happened.

Melissa Mackey: Yeah that is tricky. Usually it’s not so many that it really matters that much. Like you said, the closed lost by the time it gets to that point, it can be 18 months down the road in B2B. And so that is a tough one. I have found that it doesn’t so much bother clients because honestly, clients are so fixated on those early stage leads and strangely less fixated on, whether it ended up closing down the road.

It’s stunning. But a lot of clients that I’ve worked with, they’re like we’re just, our goals are all around MQL and SQLs. That’s what we’re focused on.

And then it’s our sales team’s responsibility. It’s again, these silos, the marketing team, the advertising team wants those early stage leads and then it goes to sales and we don’t care what happens. And really you should be tying, and that’s why we like to get all the data in that we can, even if it’s too late to affect the smart bidding at least we can see that in the system. And we can make adjustments manually if we need to, again, try to stay away from manual adjustments. But sometimes you have to, and sometimes you realize, hey, maybe we shouldn’t be using automated bidding for this particular campaign because it doesn’t behave the way that, that we expect it to.

And so we’ve gotta figure out a different way to optimize it. And occasionally you will end up saying, all right, we’ve gotta do manual bidding on this one.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so when you put all of that together, what sort of results can people expect from what they’re doing.

Melisssa Mackey: What you end up doing is that you’re actually now optimizing for your business metrics as opposed to a somewhat nebulous Google metric. And we did this for a client who had been using Google Ads form fills for their smart bidding, but they were finding that the A, they hadn’t set up Google ads tracking correctly, and so we weren’t even optimizing for that metric properly because the tracking was goofed up. But B they were just not getting as many MQLs as they thought they should be based on their internal conversion rates. So we set up HubSpot integration for them, they were a HubSpot customer and started using HubSpot MQLs for smart bidding instead.

And we found that the MQLS increased by over 50% once we went to this method, the form fill data, because it was inaccurate before, it was a little hard to compare that but that didn’t matter to the client. They were focused on MQLs and it increased by 50% and then we increased the MQLs initially, but then we were able to lower the cost of those over time and then drive more MQLs.

It just went up, substantially because we were now able to use smart bidding to lower the cost and find more of those customers and learn more about audiences. So going back to the first point, because yes smart bidding tells you, hey, these audiences are driving MQLs, and so we could use that data as well. It’s a win-win.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. We love win-wins. So hey Melissa, thank you for sharing all these insights into how to make marketing a little bit better. You’re an expert in this area, so if people want go a little deeper or work with you what’s the best way to find you?

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, they can find me on Twitter, I’m @beyondthepaid, or they can go to my website beyondthepaid.com.

Frederick Vallaeys: And why beyond the paid? Let’s talk about that for a second.

Melissa Mackey: It goes back a long way, but one of my favorite comedians is Jim Gaffigan, and he had come out with a book a while ago called Beyond the Pale ‘cause he’s a blonde haired, very fair skinned guy. And I just think he’s so funny. And I was like, pale paid. And I wanted to talk on my blog about topics just beyond paid search advertising. So that’s where I came up with that from. It goes way back.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. Love it. Okay, so find Melissa Mackey, at Beyond the paid on all the social platforms. Look her up on LinkedIn. And I’m sure you’ll be at future SMXs talking more about like the evolution of all of these things.

So thank you so much for sharing. And we’ll have another episode of Automation Layering Masterclass coming up. So if you’ve enjoyed this one today, sign up below and keep watching our channel. Thanks everyone for watching. Thanks, Melissa for being here. Thank you.