Better Leads, More Sales: Offline Conversion & Smart Bidding with Google

Episode Description

With the majority of advertisers now using Smart Bidding, how do you retain your competitive edge?

The answer lies in how you optimize goals and conversion tracking. The way you tell Google about your results helps their bidding algorithms prioritize the clicks that are most likely to lead to sales. Join this session with Google to learn how to optimize your account performance.

This panel covers:

• The type of data you should share with Smart Bidding
• Data sharing using Offline Conversion Imports, Value Adjustments, and Value Rules
• Using the Offline Conversion Helper to get started faster
• How to share offline conversion data without GCLID

Episode Takeaways

The type of data you should share with Smart Bidding

• Share data that captures the customer’s journey beyond initial interactions, like completed applications or enrollments, not just initial form fills.
• Provide data that reflects true business goals and outcomes to align Smart Bidding’s objectives with business objectives.

Data sharing using Offline Conversion Imports, Value Adjustments, and Value Rules

• Utilize Offline Conversion Imports to feed Smart Bidding systems with conversion data that occurs outside of online interactions.
• Apply Value Adjustments to recalibrate conversion values based on actual outcomes like customer retention or purchase size.
• Use Conversion Value Rules to adjust bids based on specific attributes like geolocation or customer demographics that indicate higher value.

Using the Offline Conversion Helper to get started faster

• The Offline Conversion Helper tool guides through the setup process, making it easier to implement offline conversion tracking.
• The tool provides customized steps based on industry and specific business needs, and facilitates task assignment among team members.

How to share offline conversion data without GCLID

• Utilize conversion adjustment features that don’t require GCLIDs, such as using transaction IDs to update or adjust values post-conversion.
• Implement strategies that allow the modification of conversion values based on additional insights gathered after the initial online conversion event.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to the next episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host and I’m also the co founder and CEO at Optmyzr. So thank you for joining us today. We’re back for another episode of PPC Town Hall and we’ve got some amazing guests. We got Google to come back on the show.

And whenever we have Google on, I know those are the ones with great engagement, great questions, because who better to ask all your burning automation and bid management questions to than the company that’s in charge of it at Google. So we’ll be talking to them here in a minute. But really, the topic of today’s session is about how to drive better leads and get more sales in an automated world.

Now here’s a little fact the majority the vast majority of advertisers today are no longer doing manual bid management They’re using smart bidding from Google 70 is a number that I’ve heard but that’s a pretty big number, right? And so the question that always becomes well if 70% of advertisers potentially including yourself are using automated bidding How do you stand out from the crowd?

from a field where everybody’s using the same sort of technology. And this is really interesting because even though 70 percent of advertisers are doing smart bidding, only a fraction of that, actually less than 5 percent are using the techniques. That work best to optimize that smart bidding system.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. What are, what are those techniques to give the machine more information, more data, so it can start to do a better job. And this is a true opportunity because like I said, it’s less than 5 percent of advertisers are doing this yet. We’ve seen that when they do it, it really works.

So how can you become. Those next 5 percent and still have an edge over the 90 percent of people who aren’t watching this, who aren’t doing this. And and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So I’m really excited about this one. So let’s get started with PPC title.

All right. And here are my guests. We have Emmy and Alex. Welcome to the show.

Alex Ioch: Hello. How are you guys doing?

Frederick Vallaeys: Very good. And Emi, you’re still on mute, so there we go. Hey, Emi.

Emi Wayner: Hi, Fred. How are you?

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice to see you again. So for the folks who’ve watched a lot of our episodes, Emi’s been on a number of times, so thank you for coming back on.

Alex is a first timer here. Alex, tell us a little bit about what you do. You’re a lead on automation, right?

Alex Ioch: Yeah, very nice to meet you all. So, I’m original product lead on automation. So, I’m working with large customers and agencies in America. So anything under the world a smart bidding and all the mission related.

So teaching the agencies and companies how to successfully the, as a our resources to get the success from the business.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And that’s cool because you actually work with the agency. So this isn’t just theoretical. This is actually going in, rolling up your sleeves and making sure it really works.

Alex Ioch: And before joining Google was in the agencies myself. So definitely feel the pain of there being a customer directly as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Can you tell us what agency you were with?

Alex Ioch: Which agency? Oh, let’s reserve it for the later time. Okay.

Frederick Vallaeys: Maybe one of those sneaky ones that was always like pushing the boundaries.

I, I don’t know. That was a good one. Cool. Hey, well, thanks for joining us. Everyone watching, we like to know where everybody’s calling in from today. So That’s also a good way to get warmed up. So in the comments on LinkedIn on YouTube, by the way, we’re streaming on LinkedIn live for the first time ever.

So that’s really exciting, but but use the comments on those live platforms. And when you put in comments, we can see those, we’ll put them up on the screen. So tell us where you’re calling in from to to get that tested and then also use that to use questions. So we’ve heard that roughly there’s about a 30 second delay.

So if we don’t get to your question right away, We’ll do our best to but that’s how we have some engagement on this show. Now, usually we have kind of just a conversation between the three panelists. Today, we’re going to do it slightly differently. So we actually do have a slide deck. So we’re going to pop that up on the screen here, and this is just going to help us go through kind of all the content that we have.

It’s going to have a lot of visuals, which will help explain some of the concepts. But that said. We’ve asked me to kind of be our moderator today. And then Alex and myself and me will all go through, but but me is going to help us kind of like have a really good conversation around all of this.

So as far as the agenda goes, we have tracking what matters to your business. So how do you use value bidding? As a prioritization tool. And this kind of speaks to, you know, in the old days of manual bidding, we all had bid adjustments, right? We’d all set our week bid adjustments, geo bid adjustments, device bid adjustments.

And then we, we kind of lost that when we started doing automated bidding, but there’s still ways to actually inform the machine about those adjustments that you’d want to set and bring them back in, even though you’re using smart bidding, it’s just a different way to do it and those ways, which we’ll discuss Our OCI, which is offline conversion import.

I think everyone on the call has heard about that one, but understood that a lot fewer people have heard about, and that’s conversion adjustments and conversion value rules, which is currently in beta. So we’ll be covering those as well. So so that’s the agenda we’ve got lined up for today. is going to kick us off with a great story here that has just been published.

Emi Wayner: Yeah. Thank you. So before going into the deep dive, I have an article I want to share with you. So improving the quality and the sales is a really important and increasingly important for marketers today. For those who watched some of the videos, 70 percent of legion focused marketers said the most important strategy is improving the quality of these.

So based on the survey today we are really excited to have Alex as a speaker to talk about value based bidding and tips. on how to deliver higher ROI. So that’s the topic of today in this article, I’m going to share the link with you in a chat box. But there are three main things that I take away is one is importance of collaboration with the finance team.

And then the second is key. misconception of article steps to unlock the potential and additional profit for your campaigns. And then three is a checklist for finance and marketing team for the alignment. So you’ll see that link in a chat box. Please check out after this webinar.

Frederick Vallaeys: And it’s really fascinating to involve the finance team and sort of making these value decisions because oftentimes we see the marketing team acting independently and just kind of like guessing a ROAS target.

But often that ROAS target is disconnected from profit goals. So it’s, it’s really cool when you see a company taking it all the way and talking to finance and literally asking the questions about how much does online marketing need to contribute to the bottom line. And what kind of decisions do we make, right?

Like, is this channel better than that channel? And how do we compare it all? So I’ve definitely seen great implementations of that. Good. And the link, we’ve put it on the screen. It’s already in the chat notes on the live stream. So you can find that right there. Sorry, every time I click on that, it opens up the article.

But here’s the the next slide.

Emi Wayner: Great. So with that, Alex is going to take away.

Alex Ioch: Thank you, Emi. It’s a great story. So everyone will be benefiting of, like, collaborating with our finance team. So here quickly, it’s more like a for importance why the customer data really it’s important to pull it back and really upload to the system so that Google algorithm machine learning does actually work together and actually optimizes for the goals you like to.

So from here, you can see that integrating, integrating multiple sources of customer data actually significantly improves revenue. So we on average see 20 percent incremental revenue uplift. And actually 20, 30 percent more like efficiency. So from cost per acquisition and the ROAS perspectives. So there’s really speaks to why are we should be doing a fine conversion import or a fine conversion tracking?

You know, if your first party data really matters so that, that so let’s step a little bit through quickly grow for this one, but maybe. Just kind of take a look in here all the typical funnel look like look like hypothetical example here of like university, right? You have like request information.

You have application started completed and actually student enrolled. If you are tracking only upper funnel request info, which. What sometimes typically customers and agencies track, then you’re not only like not really discovering all the questions, right? So you only have like upper funnel information and data available to Google to actually optimize from smart being perspective.

If you start tracking that student in road, it’s really good next step. But then, as you can see here, an example, you only like one. Percent conversion rate may be in like only 20 students enrolled. Really a lot of information it’s still missing, even though you already start tracking that actual deals or actual students enrolled in this example.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. What we see most advertisers do is they, you ask them, put up conversion tracking and then they’re like, well, the conversion is somebody filling out the form on the page, because honestly, that’s the easy thing to put a pixel on, right? But then all this stuff that happens after that’s actually.

That’s the true goal, right? And there’s this huge disconnect that we see in terms of what you tell Google the goal is and what you actually care about in the business. And so it’s like these next three steps, they’re just not feeding back into the machine learning system. And so then the smart bidding system is like, well, okay, I thought I did a good job for you.

I got you more people filling out the form, but did they actually become customers?

Alex Ioch: Exactly. So that, that’s always a struggle. So making sure like we always Pure connection between your goals and what you’re actually telling the system to, because it doesn’t read your mind. So you need to help it with uploading that information.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s a really good point that you said, right? Like reading your mind. Well, it didn’t need to read our mind because when we were manually setting bids and manually optimizing stuff, like it’s in our mind that we’re, we’re using those internal knowledge that we have to make this difference, but the machine doesn’t have it.

And so it’s just making the wrong decision in many cases. Right.

Alex Ioch: Yeah, exactly. So like having a step beyond that and actually uploading not just the like the upper funnel conversion action if you need online, but also multiple steps like more like a customer journey, as we call it, like middle funnel conversions, like application started and completed.

We’ll also have different signals, which you provide and it’s kind of think about the prioritization steps and then which one have different values associated with actually end of the business results. So that all helps to drive machine learning to the goal. We actually like to see and one more thing you should be tracking, not only the steps, but also helping with track and expecting value.

So think of expected value, how much. You need to give it to the system in terms of prioritization and then how much on average will that yield to your business, even though like only students are enrolled technically here from this perspective are contributing directly to your bottom line, still applications completely in the start, it will be really hugely important and helpful for the system to know if you’re do put expected value.

Don’t get hang up on the numbers specifically think of more of a Helping a system word to put the lead quality to. So I think it was like more of a scoring technique or toll on and we can go a little more examples how you efficiently do that in the next light.

Frederick Vallaeys: And the other thing I want to point out here.

So these are really starting points, right? So like Alex is saying, don’t focus too much on getting it absolutely right. And these are the calculations. If you want to This is always go back right and look at how this was calculated, but that’s how numbers. These are just starting point. So what we’re talking, what we’ll talk about towards the end of the presentation today is really okay.

Now that you have your starting point, what if you realize that the student who enrolled wasn’t actually worth the money? 10, 000, but maybe twice as much because they enrolled in a different program, right? And that’s why you can use value adjustments. And the other techniques we’ll talk about to even refine this, but these are just your starting points to point the machine in the right direction.

Alex Ioch: Exactly. And there’s like a lot more techniques could be involved to find more like advanced strategies and growth adjustments. One of them, lifetime value imports, or like actually. bringing to your client conversion imports, not only the actual deal value, but how much on average you estimate that student, maybe they will come back from bachelor’s to master’s degree.

So you can also estimate that and then have the data to the system. So that also optimize properly. Yeah. Here’s an example. Like if you do have 20 percent conversion rate between applications, complete and still in general, then. You can estimate based on number of students for all applicants completed and how many students actually enrolled your values here.

So they’re kind of working backwards. You can assign those values monetary values to the conversion actions, right? So keep that important. And then I encourage everyone to optimize on what matters to your business from account settings perspective to include those conversion actions as yes, as goals.

And then those associated, associated conversion actions should be having those expected values. So the system knows to which conversion actions to optimize.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let me ask you a question, folks. I do encourage you all to ask questions as well in the comments. So here we’re really talking from the form fill, which is typically considered a conversion to the actual conversion of the student signing up.

Sometimes advertisers don’t have a ton of data. Have you seen examples where micro conversions before even the form fill can be valued differently? and can help the machine get more of the behaviors that seem to matter. So for example, say that like say Optmyzr, right? We have, we have a pricing page.

So we know that if somebody looks at the pricing page, but they didn’t sign up, that’s still probably a more qualified lead than someone who just kind of browsed a few pages on the website, but didn’t even care about pricing. So have you seen scenarios where you put those in as micro conversions before the actual preliminary conversion to, to help steer the machine to get any more people

Alex Ioch: And think of both legion and retail world, right?

So you can have different micro conversion actions, even on the retail side as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, what would be something like on the retail side that you’ve seen?

Alex Ioch: So like add to cart is a really common intermediate step for retailers. It’s definitely not page view. So don’t do that but for actual between the purchases which your ultimate goal is or importing lifetime values advanced techniques Some customers agency prefer to also have that add to cart and then maybe Exactly as a map goes here just to estimate the those add to cart values Doing cottage the smarting only Not only to be towards that final sale, but sometimes just bring up the volume in terms of conversions by tracking that to kind of card.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, makes sense.

Emi Wayner: Okay. So, while everyone is answering that question, I just want to share one case study. This is from Zen Businesses. And what what’s great about this is they were spending a lot of time making constant manual bit management and, and as well as other adjustments. They implemented smart bidding and using automation and first data party data particularly offline conversion as well.

So what we’ve seen here is year over year, 400 percent increase in acquisition as well as 25 percent saving in acquisition costs. The team, the sales team is regularly outperforming the acquisition targets as well as single day in a week records. So that’s, that’s an amazing story coming from the actual customer integrating.

Automation and a first party data. The benefit is this is not only the cost in acquisition. It’s a, it’s also the time for your team to focus on something else other than manual bidding. So that’s the one great story that I wanted to share with you today.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. Yes. And it’s this whole brave new world of You know, account optimization is different, right?

It’s no longer about bids and the keywords of the ads and you still need to do those things, but there’s a lot of other stuff you can do that, that frees up time to maybe more strategic about your messaging.

Emi Wayner: What about Fred, what about Optmyzr case? Do you have any case from your customer story?

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, well, I mean, so in our case, what we really focus on is giving people back time. And so I think it’s very similar to smart bidding. Smart bidding takes care of like these little details that are really not what humans are best at. And in the case of Optmyzr, we run through these huge calculations and we tell you, here’s a B testing that we’ve run across your whole account for ads.

And so instead of you spending the whole morning doing that sort of an analysis, now you do it in five minutes and you’re done and you can actually spend the that half a day being strategic about what is my next set of messaging or it gives you time to test out a new capability like value rules, which we’ll discuss in a bit.

So, so I think at the core, it’s the same time to give you the same thing, which is we’ll give you back your time. And it’s slightly different ways. Like Google is really heavy on AI machine learning. Super high on stuff. And honestly, I don’t think any tool vendor can come anywhere close to what Google’s doing.

We just don’t have the resources. We don’t have as many smart engineers as Google does. And we have smart engineers, just not quite as many.

Emi Wayner: You

Frederick Vallaeys: do. All right. Right. But at the end of the day, it’s about giving you back time and so you can be more strategic. Hey, and I know we’ve we’ve got a poll question that we put up here. And then we have a question from the audience that we’ll jump into as well. But we’re curious, so how many of you use smart bidding and offline conversion import? Tell us why or why not in the comments. And we’ll try to put those comments up on the screen here. And again, remember about 70 percent plus of advertisers use smart bidding.

So we’d love to know if you’re still in that camp of not using it. Why don’t you like it? And if you’re in the camp of already using it, we’d love to know, are you already using some sort of value adjustment system like offline conversion import to better educate the machine? So I’ll put that in the comments.

And then we have a question. So Grant is asking, what’s a good number of conversions and micro conversion types to have for an account? Is there a point at which you just have too many? Alex, what have you seen?

Alex Ioch: Too many conversions. There’s no such thing as too many conversions. There’s definitely need to prioritize conversion actions, which actually driving.

The success to your business. So like, as we saw on the slide for in the educational client here, like not only the upper funnel is but also like intermediate steps all the way to the actual close deal. So focus on that as much as possible. The good news is that the next technique, which was going to go next into tomorrow, like a prioritization technique of assigning different expected values is a good tool that you don’t need to be hang up on how many conversions you have.

Because if you only optimize this for like one conversion action from applying conversion track and import, then there’s like certain number of conversions you need to have. But then if you still have the lead leads and then applications started completed more like intermediate conversion actions which are all like all those conversion action optimized towards, then you don’t need to kind of hang up on that like last student.

like actual student enrolled, right? So you can have that upper funnel and middle funnel conversion actions in the mix, but the system will prioritize towards the ones that are actually more important from conversion value perspective, right? So there’s no like definitely as many conversions as possible is, is a good idea that as long as they’re relevant and driving good success to your business.

But if you don’t have too many conversion actions, think about prioritizing different conversion actions in the mix and focus on them from like expecting value perspective.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. So you can never have enough data points. Makes total sense. But now how do you prioritize those data points? And I think that’s a What’s in these slides, right?

So Alex, take us through.

Alex Ioch: And then, so if you think about like elite acquisition, so like the first app we just discovered about, there’s a bunch of data signals available from like online perspective. So we have, I think 500, 000 and don’t ask me who counted those. No idea, but 500, 000 voting engineers actually have on hand for machine learning from the search perspective.

And I think 75 million are on display. So really well for data, obviously not all of those kind of like signals are real time are going to be important, but some of them, the ones we don’t have like on your fingertips manually. Still going to be well for those signals, which I say

Frederick Vallaeys: those numbers again, you know, this is you 75 million signals for

Alex Ioch: on display.

Yeah, exactly. So how many 500, 000? That’s what number last time I heard. That’s interesting because you

Frederick Vallaeys: have to slide. That’s like 70 million signals evaluated in like milliseconds.

Alex Ioch: That’s exactly happens because like you’re also doing a cross network. So

Frederick Vallaeys: And I guess the point is, you know, is it 70 million, 75 million?

Like, those 5 million don’t really make a difference to us humans at the end of the day. Like, it’s not like we’re going to but the machines, the more data you give them, the more signal they can see. Right. So that’s kind of the underlying point.

Alex Ioch: Exactly. And then if you keep in mind that not all of them is going to be, Immediately as much important as other ones.

So a handful of them will be right real time and then making the decision left of intent based on those that’s really important. So this is just an example. You see here from the online perspective,

Frederick Vallaeys: but so we got people weighing in here. They thumbs up on smart bidding. But no on offline conversion import and it sounds like not because they don’t like it just haven’t gotten there So I think we’re coming up on the slides here about how do you do that?

And alex you’re also going to share a really cool tool that I wasn’t even aware about On how to get started with offline conversion import so stick around in about five minutes. We’ll be right at that content

Alex Ioch: Yeah, exactly. So and what’s the transition off? What information you give to the system from online perspective?

It’s really important to like that first party dating information. Which by the way is anonymized and really like strict on privacy rules and everything, but once you import that information back, speaks to a lot more information, which we could not have counted. So like your information about student enroll, it actually could be accounting from your perspective, things like SAT scores, your, did they getting awards, like all, all that great information telling.

On the back end of your CRM systems does that actually student qualified, maybe as intermediate steps, will they be enrolled or not? So passing down that information back to the system will tell you, okay, well, first of all, you have more extra touch points, extra conversion points. To optimize towards. But then there’s like a wealth of signals, but you are so straight that conversion action on the backend.

Right.

Frederick Vallaeys: And what was interesting here is so if somebody says, yeah, we have SAT scores for our leads, but you can’t actually tell Google the SAT scores for your leads. Right. So, and that’s the trick with OCI is how do you kind of take everything that you know, which Google has no field for you to import that data.

Like, how do you still communicate? And that’s what we’ll talk about. With offline conversion imports.

Alex Ioch: Yeah, exactly. So the system is only as smart and as, as accurate and efficient as your conversion actions you actually provide. So we’ll focus on the, on this technique. But before going to this one, there’s like a concept here with Boston Consulting Group actually did the research in, in agencies and customers, like to each extent that they utilize that.

As we call it, actor human supervision. So like adjustments on any sort or like directing the nudging the machine learning to the way they want to go. And it turned out for the the customers and agency who do. So there’s actually. 15 percent of incremental more uplifting conversion value. So definitely encourage that, that collaboration between the machine learning algorithm.

Just not just let it be, of course, is going to perform much better than manual, but also help with implementing new touch points and then give you that wealth of first party data you have. So that performance didn’t matter.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then that’s cool, right? Because basically we’re saying those everyone here who’s using Smart Bidding, while you’re capturing the 20 percent improvement, but now if you do the OCI and value direction, then you get another 15 percent.

And that’s averages, of course, but that’s You know, you’ll get almost as much gain from doing the techniques we’re talking about here as from just implementing smart bidding.

Alex Ioch: And kind of once you think about your business, obviously not all your customers will be contributing the same value to your business.

And that’s exactly as we think about more of the next techniques and assigning different expected values and where you should be prioritizing your time from a fine conversion import perspective. Even in like retail perspective, we touch like You have your dynamic tracking. Good news is that the system knows what actually kind of products you know, the customer is interested to buy and if the products touch points are really different in value.

So even though you have one conversion action purchases on the backend system knows actually how much value will that particular customer bring to the business. So what’s on the, on the auction level happening is that. the system not only predicts conversion rate, but also if you’re utilizing the techniques of value based bidding, which is target rise and maximize conversion value, then is also predict conversion value, expect the conversion value for that auctions, like real time, like millisecond, right?

And then even though you have like, maybe only one conversion action purchases, like market standard for retail And for lead gen is also like for educational client examples. If you’re prioritizing different conversion actions. So like in this example, you’d have your filled out an interest form, which it may be value 10.

And sign up for like free online course. You will be telling the system that the second one is actually three times more important to you from the conversion value perspective. And then as the prediction goes, if an auction a real time, it’s also linked heavier to prioritize the bonds are actually.

Have a high likelihood and chances of signing up for a free online course. Yeah, and in the short, as I mentioned before, use a value based bidding game. It’s target wise and maximize current value when available for you to prioritize your leads. And then the signing more like a quality scoring.

So don’t again, hang up on the actual numbers as much. It’s really pays off. If you have that actual financial information, they work really well with your teams, but the, the weights are more important here and this is why you should be doing it. So like, if you’re only. focusing on the number of conversions, which is great because still it’s better than not focusing on conversions at all.

But you’re going to be more efficient in allocating your bits and resources, right? So there’s no missed opportunity and there’s no over investment in some of the customers who may be less keen on the, in terms of revenue they can bring to your business. Couple more things, like once you consider what to bring to the system, right? So definitely applying conversion tracking is really important. But then if you do, do not have, for some reason, we’re going to talk about the new tool we have, which helps you to bring that information, but don’t be discouraged to still you, you’ll utilize like more like a value approach and more prioritization techniques.

Even if online conversion tracking, we still see a significant uplift. Say like typical example, like we have like all dealership, all like all the, all the client, right. They have like calls, they have the form submissions. Still like assigning different values to those, they could be able to grow their business significantly.

And

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah. And one cool thing here. So with online conversion tracking, It really requires that in real time when something happens, you already make those value judgments and that’s kind of hard because now you as the marketing team need to formulate what is that value decision and then go and talk to your engineering team that runs the website so that they can put in the correct values, but to do all of those calculations in like near real time.

It’s difficult. It’s not as easy as it sounds, right? So that’s why a lot of people don’t put the exact correct values in at the time of the online conversion. But what if you could say, you know, you get your list of leads at the end of the day and you just run it through a scoring process, which can take as long as you need it to take, right?

It can be a slow process. Where you do it manually and I don’t recommend doing it manually, but you could do it manually or you could run it through some like little machine learning regression model that you have at your company, which takes more time, but it’s okay. It takes more time because now at the end of that process, you’re able to feed that data back into Google.

And if you got it wrong, Well, the next day you do it again and you again update the values into Google. And so you, you progressively become more and more precise and that helps the machine make better and better decisions as you get more precise about what it is you truly care about. So that’s why offline conversion import is so important.

Alex Ioch: Exactly. And then from offline conversion tracking perspective, like you have like up until 90 days to import that offline conversions to the system. Right. But the, you know, if you need to adjust some values and then here’s an actually examples of what you can do. So from the retail side, there’s actually a lot more advanced techniques you can go for as well.

So for like, you can, you can transactions will be your first step and you’re tracking the values and revenue, how much they bring to your business. But then some customers now are trying to, again, tie that connection with their profitability and then really still be working with closely with their finance team.

So instead of actually just revenue itself, gross revenue, they bring the profit. So by estimating that with gross profit margins, they have an account. So like, like importing not just the revenue itself, but actual profit. How cool is it? You can now optimize for profit with value based bidding or smart bidding strategies, right?

You can step in, like, take a step beyond. You not only optimize for profit, you can actually assign lifetime value of the customer to the values you import back, and now you’re optimizing for customer lifetime value. So it’s really cool. And then speaks to that notion of having that active human supervision.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And I think I’m talking about this slide. Alex, stop me if you want to talk about this one. But yeah, so most of us have heard about offline conversion imports. There’s also a technique called conversion adjustment. And so here’s the thing, right? Offline conversion import. You have to get the GCLID from Google.

You have to put the GCLID into your CRM system. And so it’s this whole new piece of data that you kind of have to like, start thinking about. You probably didn’t have it before your engineers who built a website didn’t think about GCLIDs because it’s not something that’s in their realm of expertise.

Now, the nice thing with conversion adjustment is you don’t need a GCLID. All you need is a unique transaction ID. And guess what? Every time you do a transaction, you probably have a unique ID for that already. The only thing you need to do is in the conversion pixel at one additional line, which is, this is the transaction ID.

And then at any point in the future for, or not any point, but in the next 55 days after that transaction was logged through a conversion, you restate it. Right. And so a use case would be. Customers who bought 100 worth of product, but they returned 60 worth of it. Restate the value, tell Google that no, it wasn’t 100, but it was 40 that you sold, or you do your margin and profit calculations like Alex said, you do that offline and then you restate and you say, no, it was 100 worth of sales, but it was actually 10 worth of profit.

By the way, you’d never want to put your profit data. In the online conversion tracking because guess what the customer could just like look at the source code of the page And they could know exactly how much profit you made on the sale Right if I go I buy a lot of sneakers if I buy a bunch of sneakers And I look at the profit margin and i’m like really adidas made that much money on my sale Like let me wait for these sneakers to go on sale or let me find a better coupon Yeah, that’s

Alex Ioch: that’s one of the common objections for sure over here.

So yeah But offline conversion tracking perspective you can put that information

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. But the beauty is with conversion adjustments, this all happens on the backend, your customer doesn’t see this, but the smart bidding system from Google does get it and becomes smarter because of it. And it’s actually easier to implement.

So that’s why I think it’s such a good thing. And if you haven’t heard about this go ahead and click on that link right there. Actually, you can click on the link, but look it up on Google and you’ll find out how

Alex Ioch: to adjust your conversions. That’s an actual name of the article from health support.

So I have a lot of information from technical implementation, what’s available or not. Do you need some sort of tech tracking or not? And use cases are really predominant. So like, even like, for example, you have hotel. And then somebody cancels, right, or doesn’t show up necessarily for that booking. So, or the travel industry, right, so that’s really predominant.

So, check it out. You know, so if you’re already tracking those conversions, might as well just restate them to make accurate data.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. Okay, and Emi, I think you have another case study for

Emi Wayner: us. Sorry, I just I just shared that link, so you will see it in a, in a chat as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Awesome, thank you.

Emi Wayner: Okay, so this is another case from Interactive Brokers. So what? The challenge is specialized audience. So they have very specialized niche audience and to increase the volume of qualified prospects. So it’s a very similar concept as the other one. And what they did with the Google sales team and the partner is important offline bottom funnel conversion metrics.

And align reporting and decision making with the marketing objectives. So based on these two cases, we can say that offline conversion is increasingly more important and everyone is seeing increased performance. And based on your existing performance as well, we can see average 8 percent increase in ROAS as well.

And then we’ve seen a lot better cases as well, but in average 8 percent in ROAS. So highly recommend trying both offline conversion and smart bidding together.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. So I’m sorry, I should have shown those numbers while you were talking about them, but luckily you had them in your head. All right.

So so I think we’re preaching to the choir here, right? Like everybody does smart bidding. We know this works, but we all want to Get to oci but how do we make it easier? And I think alex, this is the new tool that you wanted to share

Alex Ioch: Yeah, and we definitely heard loud and clear everyone so that It could be challenging to import offline kind of conversion track.

And so a couple months ago. I think we launched a new tool which is called oci helper. So you can go at oci helper with dot with google. com. So really seamless and really like robust tool in terms of making sure you know, what are the actual steps you can take. And the benefits, I guess, it’s a sponsor is actually encouraging collaboration.

So if you’re not the technical point of contact of your team, you can assign the tasks And it’s really, the process is customized to your industry and the agency type. So take a look I encourage everyone to it’s really seamless and so far, great feedback from the industry. So if you haven’t check it out, and if you’re, you know, hesitating to do that offline conversion import this is a great solution for you.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so it sounds like a bit of a project management tool so that you can bring together the various stakeholders. And Google is kind of the central place that tells people when to do what.

Alex Ioch: Project management, but there’s also like actually steps you need to take from an import perspective. So it’s really more of a technically customizable and grace like solution for everyone.

Nice. All right. So

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah, OCI helper is one technique. And then the, the other technique is using the tool like Zapier. Many of you probably familiar with Zapier Zapier can connect to your CRM system. And so assuming that you’ve put the GCLID into your CRM. By the way, we have a really good article on on the Optmyzr blog on how to grab the GCLID through Google Tag Manager and stick it into Google Analytics.

And so that’s just one implementation, but you could sort of tweak that to stick the GCLID into your CRM system or drop it in a form. And maybe Ashwin can find a link and show that up on the screen and in the comments as well. Ashwin’s our producer behind the scenes, by the way, for those of you who don’t know that name.

But but yeah, you have those options. You have Zapier. So the thing with Zapier is once you’re in your CRM system, you identify a prospect as a marketing, marketing qualified lead, or someone who actually became a customer. And maybe you’ve got some identifiers about perspective, lifetime value. All of that data can now flow from your CRM automatically back into Google through a connection with Zapier.

Zapier, by the way, we support it as well in Optmyzr. So through alerts and blueprint tasks, anything that comes out of the Optmyzr system, you can send into your task management system, or you could put it into a Google sheet. So Zapier is a great solution to move data between different places.

Really helpful to marketers as well. So if you haven’t looked at that, I recommend you do. And then there’s the third option, right? Okay, so we’ve covered offline conversion import, which requires the GCLID. We’ve covered value adjustments, which requires a transaction ID. And these two, the last two are really cool because they’re super specific.

They look at One click and what happened to that click through the G click, where they look at one transaction and what happened to that transaction through the transaction ID. You should use those because they’re the most specific, but sometimes you can’t. There’s an easier option. This one’s still currently in beta from Google, but this is conversion value rules.

And so here you can basically say. that certain attributes of customers in your mind equate to desirable behaviors. Okay. And if that’s a desirable behavior, then you can overvalue that conversion. So think of it like bid adjustments applied to smart bidding. So here’s an example. So how does it work?

So say that you know that users in New York are really valuable to you because historically, you know that if somebody buys in New York, they tend to become a repeat customer. So you can overvalue that by 20%. So you can literally say if the conversion came from New York at 20 percent more to the value.

And so it’s, it’s more generic, right? Because now you’re doing this for groups of people. Obviously not every single customer from New York 20 percent more valuable, but you’re making an aggregate decision about it. to still kind of steer the machine in the direction that you think works well for your business.

And so here’s a couple of use cases. And Alex, I invite you to you know. Yeah.

Alex Ioch: So like the three use cases, like geolocation adjustments, right. To Google, like, and your first party audience data. So think about like, if we imported that customer match lists and you really know for sure that It’s going to be more the different values that they’ll bring to the to the business.

You can, like, we encourage you to definitely to check it out. And then this, this tool conversion value rules helps you to state different values. So the, the way it will work in a system, then you actually gonna Okay, everything that there’s so many signals already worked in consideration on the back end, even if you import the actual first party data as well.

But if there’s some reason you think that that location or that out and specifically or that device for your business You need to focus more on that. You can add the value so that say like extra $20, for example, for people in New York or like, you know, extra $30 for people who are from that customer mesh list so that the system will know that there’s like higher expected value, which will bring to the business while you focus on this one.

And we’ll take that into consideration from the bid perspective. Right? So we’ll be a lot more aggressive, like in terms of the. Understanding the impact and then taking that into consideration that extra value you provide.

Frederick Vallaeys: And this, by the way, Emi, I don’t know if you can share anything on the availability of this beta. But what I did want to say is that Optmyzr is currently working on an integration with this this capability. So Optmyzr customers later this summer will will have a way. To start using this through our capabilities. And what we’ll do specifically is we’ll help you make these value decisions.

So we’ll kind of prioritize and we might tell you, these are the primary locations from which we see a lot of volume coming. So can you tell us something about these and can you do relative rates? Because that’s often the hard thing. And Alex was talking about that too, too many advertisers, they get stuck in saying, Should I add 10 percent of value or 15 percent or 20%?

And there’s no real right answer, right? This is about directionality. It’s about, is someone from New York more valuable than California? Yes. Okay, great. New York, higher than California. New York versus New Jersey. Okay. New York is still better. So New Jersey is now kind of like in the middle, but then you ask New Jersey versus California, which one’s better.

So you, you kind of start stacking all of these locations to say, okay, here’s my prioritized list and then we can set in bit adjustments that keep it in that relative order and then the machine can go and do its thing. So we’ll make that a lot easier.

Alex Ioch: And one more thing. So to keep in mind, not, not to overthink this is for like really edge cases where you need to make those adjustments, it’s like, we have like, for example, like one retail client who have different in store locations.

Right. And then they’re optimizing for actually like offline sales as well as online sales, like more only China revenue. So from, from those perspective, like they know for sure, like. New York is like 30 percent higher in terms of like offline conversion revenue they bring to the business or something from online.

We don’t know. And they are like really like prioritizing that location. So given that using this beta for that perspective, but on, on average, on in general, like it’s encouraging to think of smart being actually knowing like your audience and all the data, the wealth of data signals on the backend already.

So if it knows like one person in California or like an Oklahoma will be. more valuable to you, it will pick up those signals early automatically. So you don’t have to overthink about it. You don’t necessarily need this beta to do what you’re doing already. So like prioritizing customers and bringing more higher value.

So this is more of like an advanced technique. If you’re something you’re the system wouldn’t know from like over your fine conversion data. So yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right and Emi Jim, one of our astute viewers, noticed that there’s a reference to this guide about the slides. So can you guys share these slides in any way?

Emi Wayner: Yeah, so we we won’t be able to share this exact slide with everyone this time, but we will publish some of this key content on Optmyzr blog after this webinar. So you get some of this.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yes. So we’ll, we’ll get that blog post live next week, Jim. And if you want to write into our support team support at Optmyzr.

com, they can let you know when that’s live, or you can just subscribe to the blog. By the way, everyone’s subscribed to the YouTube channel. We do these sessions every two weeks. So it’s a good way to stay on top of all the latest information. Okay. But back to these slides here. So with the conversion value rules, we’ve kind of explained what you can do.

But basically, you can look at audiences, geolocation, devices, audiences, really cool because this is a lot of first party data. And as we’re starting to hear more and more about flock and the retirement of third party cookies and third party data, the more that you can focus on using something or doing something useful with your first party data, that’s great.

And this tool. exactly enables that. So look to conversion value rules. The one word of caution is conversion. So smart bidding already considers differences in conversion rate performance based on these factors. So do not use this technique. Don’t use conversion value rules to tell Google that people in California Fill out the form your lead gen form twice as often as someone in New York, right?

That you have twice the conversion rate because the machine already knows that what you need to tell the machine is What’s the thing that I haven’t told google right after somebody fills out the form Do I know that someone in california behaves differently than someone in new york? That’s what you want to use this for and again if you can be precise if you can use offline conversion import With the GCLID data, then use that because then Google can say, Oh, well, here’s this click from this user with the 500, 000 attributes that Alex was talking about.

Which of these attributes seem to indicate a higher likeliness of that person truly becoming a customer? In the absence of that precision, you use value rules to make kind of common judgments on people in locations, on devices, in audience lists.

Alex Ioch: Yeah, exactly. So applying conversion import is like much more precise.

Even if you don’t have like that accurate information and data still, you can prioritize like that bottom of the funnel or mid funnel conversion action will be much more accurate and precise and give you the nice of the machine learning to direction you like to go.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. Okay. So I want to leave people with one file place to look at this.

So it’s a really we’ve discussed today. Why Smart Bidding gets better if you use value based directionality. Again, I think that’s preaching to the choir. We all get that. Most of us use Smart Bidding. But then what are the three ways that you can get started to actually set that directionality and communicate values?

And we’ve done a blog post on the Optmyzr blog in the last week. This describes those three ways. And again, as we’ve said, it’s offline conversion import, there’s conversion value adjustments, and there’s the conversion value rules data. So you can read more about these here get some links to help materials, but really good resources to get started.

And like we saw, Advertisers who do this seem to on average benefit another 15%. So it really does unlevel the playing field for you. All right. So that’s what we wanted to share with people today. We’re also pretty close to the time we had allocated here. We’d love to. See if there’s any more questions.

Also put in the chat, are you convinced? Are you going to start using OCI value? Adjust conversion value rules. Did we teach you something new? Hopefully. So let us know if if we did a good job helping you here today. Alex, any, any final thoughts from you?

Alex Ioch: No, I think that definitely the Optmyzr, great partner.

So Reducto subscribe to the block and attend this town hall session. So definitely. utilizing that machine algorithm, which already has a lot of information, but feeding more from your first party data. It’s really going to be helpful for you to optimize for business outcomes, which you would like to achieve.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. I mean,

Emi Wayner: Yeah, looking at all the comments from the audience, everyone seems to be using smart bidding already, but not offline conversion. So I’m glad we touched upon that, but we didn’t go deep dive today. So I’m thinking about for the next session something around OCT or getting the comments from everybody.

And based on that questions and feedback, we will try and set up another webinar focusing on OCI.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I think Matthews, thank you for that feedback. So the sad reality is this is actually more complicated than just like flipping a switch. If it was just flipping a switch, I think more than 5 percent of people would be doing it.

But it’s also really what sets what gives you the opportunity as agencies, as PPC experts to take your client’s account to your business account to the next level. So absolutely read up. Some of these things are not ultimately that complicated to do after you do, you know, through your checklist.

So definitely invite everyone to look at that. There is a good question here from Dave about limitations on on sort of private data.

Emi Wayner: Yeah, maybe we should touch we’ll get back to you, Dave if you can email us, that’d be great.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And, and so and he’s going to do that. So from my perspective, the thing is you’re not really uploading private data, right?

Dave. So basically if you sell insurance, you’re looking at attributes within your business of who signed up for a higher level of insurance, like who’s got recreational vehicles, who’s got five recreational vehicles, vacation homes, but that’s probably a better customer for you because they’re going to have more policies than someone who just has a single car.

You know that, but that doesn’t mean you have to tell Google, Oh, hey, Fred’s got like, he’s got an RV and he’s got a motorcycle, which by the way, I don’t. Right. But, but that’s, you’re not sharing that personal data. You’re just telling Google, Hey, well, here was a click. And based on something I knew in my business, I want more of these types of clicks, and I’m not telling you what the attributes were, but you Google within your 500, 000 signals.

Can you find me more of that type of person? Right. And so I think that’s where there’s sort of a line drawn between the personal information that you have versus what you communicate back into Google, which doesn’t.

Alex Ioch: It’s, it’s a distinction between what you track and then so the data is still going to be anonymized based on your GCLID information, which is an anonymous string of hundred characters, right?

So you only like tell like, okay, for this GCLID, this is how much actually value I got from the backend. And that’s pretty much what the offline corroding tracking will be from there’s a not too confused with like actually targeting, right? So from the targeting perspective, there’s definitely limitations and now we’re trying to reach here.

Read on our support articles about personally defined information on how you can not target specific verticals and industries. So you can say like for one particular customer who we think that health healthcare and insurance industry that you can you can customize the ad for that, but you can track information for fine conversion tracking information, but again, I encourage everyone to read more support obstacles on this one.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And what might be good here. So I’ll tell you about a couple sessions and Optmyzr does. So every for twice a month we do the PPC Town Hall. Also, we’ll be back in two weeks with another set of great panelists. I’m hearing the feedback that we could do more sessions on O. C. I. They may actually be better suited for a Tuesday session.

We do twice a month, which is Learn with Optmyzr. And that’s where we look a little bit more inside of our tool. Get really hands on practical. Like how do you implement some of these things? As opposed to hearing PPC town hall, where we try to tee up the concepts and hear from a variety of people, why they use them, why they like them, why they don’t like them kind of what we did today.

Right. So really great to hear that people are excited about the potential of OCI, but now we’ve got to help you actually implement it. So we’ll announce some new sessions for learn with Optmyzr, and those are also on the Optmyzr YouTube channel. So if you’ve subscribed to that. You’ll get word of those sessions as well.

Well, with that fantastic guests I love it when we are able to share things, people haven’t necessarily been able to do and tell them why these would be great opportunities for Alex. Amy, thanks for being here, everyone. Thanks for watching us today. Subscribe to the channel and let us know an Optmyzr.

If there’s anything we can help with reach out to the support team and we’ll do our best to make you as effective as possible in PPC. We’ll see you in two weeks. Bye now.

Alex Ioch: Thank you so much, Tim. Bye bye.