How to collect and use first-party data to win in a cookieless future

Episode Description

Third-party cookies are going away, most likely in 2024 if Google doesn’t push it back once again.

But it will happen and first-party data will be the way forward.

Aside from that reason, collecting first-party data also ensures that you’re

- complying with privacy regulations

- collecting a more accurate form of data and

- prioritizing data-driven marketing

But how can you go about collecting first–party data? And more importantly, how to use it in your campaigns?

In this episode, you’ll hear about all of that from Kerri Amodio and Navah Hopkins.

Tune in to learn:

- How to get clean first-party data?

- How to apply first-party data insights to your campaigns?

- Data collection tips for B2B & Ecommerce

Episode Takeaways

How to Get Clean First-Party Data

• CRM Review and Cleanup: Ensure your CRM data is accurate by regularly reviewing and cleaning it, as this is crucial for campaign success.
• Enhance Data Collection: Modify data collection strategies to capture higher quality data, such as using LinkedIn for work email acquisition.

How to Apply First-Party Data Insights to Your Campaigns

• Implement Offline Conversion Tracking: Use offline conversion tracking to feed CRM conversion data back to advertising platforms, improving targeting and bidding strategies.
• Adapt Bidding Strategies: Utilize value-based bidding to prioritize leads with higher potential value, enhancing campaign ROI.

Data Collection Tips for B2B & Ecommerce

• Monitor Micro Conversions: Track micro conversions that indicate user engagement to gain deeper insights into customer behavior.
• Segment Campaigns: For B2C, especially e-commerce, segment campaigns based on profitability or customer demographics to optimize budget allocation and targeting.

Additional Insights

• Utilize Cross-Platform Strategies: Leverage tools like LinkedIn’s website demographics to understand audience characteristics across different marketing channels.
• Maximize UTM Parameters: Extensively use UTM parameters to track campaign effectiveness and make data-driven decisions across platforms.

Episode Transcript

KERRI AMODIO: Because we’re first party data, we need that data to be as clean and accurate as possible. I can’t even tell, that’s such a huge pain point. I can’t even tell you how many clients have come on board with Closed Loop. And they’re, they tell us, Oh, our Salesforce data is just unreliable. Well, that’s a huge red flag because we’re probably going to need some data and insight to pull from there in order to be successful.

So honestly, that is step one. I mean, we really encourage our clients To look in their CRM and of course, clean it up, work with sales teams to make sure that that data is possible. It’s being input correctly, but also look at what data is missing. I see a lot, especially on the B2B side that they’re getting a ton of like personal emails They’re getting gmails, yahoos, etc.

Well, think about it. What can you do to increase the number of work emails that we can go after? So does that mean you’re changing how your forms are written? Now you’re changing the question and asking for a work email. I know I’m linked in. You can. Basically require a work email on the LinkedIn lead gen forms.

Maybe you use a platform like zoom info. That’s going to help you with more data matching. So really just getting that to a point where we can rely on it, because especially as we start, I know this conversation is going to go into a lot of offline conversion tracking or offline conversion imports especially as we get into that conversation and we start.

Start importing our backend data into these ad platforms. That is going to be essential because we, if we are not feeding it accurate, clean data, then the algorithms are just not going to do what we want them to do.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Hello, and welcome to another episode of PPC town hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host.

I’m also a co founder and CEO at Optmyzr. So this week we’re going to address an issue that’s been sort of brewing for a long time. Third party cookies are going away, or they’ve been going away now for a long time from Google, and we’re sort of seeing the end in sight, and that means it’s really time now to start thinking about your first party data.

If you haven’t already done it, you should, because you can do amazing things with first party data in PPC. And so to talk about that today, we brought together two amazing experts. We know a lot about audiences, first party data, Kerri Amodio from Closed Loop, Navah from Optmyzr. And so welcome to another episode of PPC temple.

And here are my guests for today. Kerri, welcome. You’re a first timer on the show. Tell people who you are and what you do.

KERRI AMODIO: Yeah, thanks Fred. So I’m calling in from Long Island, New York. I proudly am a senior digital advertising manager for a digital advertising agency based out of Roseville, California called Closed Loop.

I’ve been with them for going on five years already. So, I’m lucky to manage a team of amazing marketing managers who are helping innovative companies like Calendly, Calm, Rakuten, Huckberry, just to name a few achieve exceptional results in their digital advertising campaigns. Personally, my expertise mostly lies on the B2B side of the house across search, display, and social channels.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great. Great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us. And then we have Navah. She’s not on the show for the first time ever, but she is here for the first time as a member of the Optmyzr team, which I’m very excited about. So, Navah. Remind people who you are, what you what you do nowadays and say hello.

NAVAH HOPKINS: For sure. And for those of you that have been watching PPC Town Hall for a while, you might remember Fred actually had me on the show to talk about this right when this was first coming out. And it is my delight and my pleasure to now be speaking to you again as Part of the Optmyzr team. Optmyzr has been doing a tremendous amount to bring knowledge, actionable insights, and meaningful workflows to agencies, in house brands, to really help cut through the noise and really make automation a happy part of our workflow as opposed to a panic.

So I’m delighted to be part of Optmyzr. I, Navah Hopkins have been in digital. For almost 15 years, I’ve worked in software. I’ve worked in agency. I’ve worked with product on the CS organizations. I, I share lessons learned but most importantly, it’s, it’s about helping folks achieve meaningful results.

And so I’m, I’m delighted to share insights, but then also tackle things maybe from a more B2C perspective. I think Carrie is going to probably handle a lot of the B2B. So between the three of us, we should have a pretty meaningful conversation.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Sounds like a plan. So both of you have done amazing presentations at SMX.

Kerri, you’ve done one on first party data. Navah, your most recent one, I believe, was on audiences. So let’s just jump into it, right? And Kerri, maybe you lead off, but what’s going on with the migration away from third party data? And why is this today such a big, important topic?

KERRI AMODIO: This has really been a few years in the making.

Now I spoke at SMX back in, I think, spring or May of 2021. And even since then, so much has changed. This is all really in response to user privacy concerns and getting browsers, websites mobile devices in compliance with new regulations. They’re all phasing out support for third party cookies.

I remember really the biggest change to our industry was in the spring of 2021 when Apple had rolled out iOS 14. 5, which had allowed iOS users to block advertising tracking on apps. for the first time. And this was initially a huge blow to tracking conversions. I remember, especially on social channels like LinkedIn and Facebook, which drive a ton of mobile traffic.

Conversion volume was completely dropping off, hurting the algorithms, hurting performance overall. The audience sizes were very, very limited since then. Facebook has not been able to keep up with a lot of that. the audiences that they once offered. So it’s really made an impact to our industry and forced us to kind of think outside the box, get us to adapt to what’s happening in the, in the industry and what’s become the norm now.

And that’s really first party data that we’re really becoming first party first rather than third party first.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Exactly. And so, ANavah, maybe you explain this a little bit about you know, what does first party data mean and how does it connect with audiences, but fundamentally there’s a shift away where we can no longer rely on the easy button that the ad engines have so long provided us.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Well, one of the,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: one

NAVAH HOPKINS: of the things that I think is the most earth shattering about all of this is back when I think. Both Carrie and I put together our initial data sets and really started aggressively talking about this because, as was mentioned, we’ve been, this has been a long time coming. There was this idea of partnering with the ad networks and you would have your 1st party data and they would amplify it.

They would expand upon it. And 1 of the things that was actually very funny when I did my presentation, as soon as I locked it in, as soon as it was in, and I couldn’t make any major changes, the change where similar audiences would be depreciated came out. And I was like. You know, that’s that that is that is par for the course.

But what I found really interesting about that change is the idea that it’s not that similar audiences were going away. It’s that we as humans just couldn’t say, I want to target similar audiences or I want to exclude similar audiences. It’s just that as you start to communicate. With the machine, as you start to speak to the algorithm and say, this is the data that I really value.

These are my people that I really value, or these are the people that I don’t really value. You, you start to then be able to amplify and improve your performance. So the idea of nagging someone with retargeting just isn’t going to work. And it’s To be honest, whether we could say it worked or it didn’t in the past is irrelevant because the tools at our disposal, the privacy compliance that we need to account for don’t even sweat those tactics.

At this point, it’s far more important that our creative speaks to our personas, and we know who we want to target as well as creating those consensual conversations that it’s people have bought into sharing their information with us and to have that continued conversation. And when we’re targeting that new people that.

Those existing folks inform them, but we’re not blanketly targeting. It’s it’s built in as a targeting idea. It’s not explicitly targeting.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. And I carry go a little bit over the distinction maybe, but like, when you look at similar audiences or. Topic targeting on Google or anything that’s sort of like relying on Google’s data versus remarketing, which is Google is helping us speak to people who’ve already been to our site.

Like, where is that line drawn? What is first party data and what’s third party? And when it comes to first party, how do we build more of it?

KERRI AMODIO: Yeah. So first party is going to be anything that you own. It is the data in your CRM. It comes from your website your social media page data, just to name a few.

It’s anything that you own. And honestly, first party data is the most valuable data that you have. Like Navah said, I mean, it’s going to be so much more important to go after somebody that you know, that is giving you the intense feedback. signals rather than going after somebody that might show some intent via Google.

So that’s really where the difference lies is first party is coming from you and your systems. And then third party is going to be those audiences that the ad platforms were coming up with on their own via different signals. So that would be like the custom intent data that would be interest based data across all channels.

I know social channels are very, very heavily reliant on interest based data. Based targeting. So that’s really the main difference there between first and third.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So some people talk about the death of the keywords. I suppose that’s then overblown, right? So we have to go back and we have to use keywords to connect with a consumer.

Who may be thinking about something that we can offer them. And then once that consumer has come to us and now we have a first party relationship, now we need to do something more with it. And I suppose that’s why Facebook is suffering so much from this change, because on Facebook, it really is about introducing people to your brand, people who might be in the right demographic, as opposed to people going and searching for something, which is what people do on Google, right?

Is that sort of a fair way to explain kind of what’s happening here? You have to think about it.

KERRI AMODIO: I think so. I see even just sticking to the Google side. I mean, with knowing that similar audiences are going away, I’m relying so much more on custom intent audiences and keyword based audiences and searches and things like that, because it’s just, it’s such those audiences are stronger.

They’re showing a level of intent on social socials. Just because. And it’s become very, very difficult, especially in the B2B space. I do really like Facebook lookalike audiences but I don’t know how long they’re going to stick around. You know, are they going to follow suit? Are they going to follow what Google is doing and getting rid of that type of list matching and go find somebody like this?

So you kind of got to be prepared for anything and listen to your data and really dive into the back end to, to see what’s working. You have to make sure the quality is.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Well, one thing that’s actually kind of interesting when you bring up custom intent audiences and, and Fred, I, I, I know you, you have the video clip of me talking about it because it was featured in a previous one of the death of the keyword.

I don’t think the keyword is dead. I think keywords are going to be Another audience, if we look at Pmax and how Pmax is set up, regardless of whether it’s B2B or B2C, keywords are there in those custom intent audience segments. You take your keyword list, you put it right in there that keywords live on.

They just aren’t active targets. If we think about broad match and how broad match has evolved. The, the very mechanic of match types where it was semantic search just isn’t as important anymore. Audiences are now factored into it. So, as we think about 1st party data versus 3rd party data, it’s so much more important that we as humans are controlling.

What data is feeding into those systems, because that that is. Our way of speaking to the machine, as opposed to fully delegating, because while it is true, 100%, there is value in the native audiences, like, in market. Talking about lookalikes on on Facebook. I’m actually seeing slightly better performance when you go slightly away from that 1 percent where we kind of for holding control.

Let it let it go a little bit. But when we when we fully rely on those, we are going to end up not having that perfect message to to market. Connection and when you’re able to really own that 1st party data piece and spell it out, it’s it’s perfect. 1 thing I’m really, I’ll be really interested to see is if Google is going to follow suit with Microsoft on removing the minimum spend for a customer match lists, because as new brands are coming up and as new accounts are coming up.

That is the main source of first party data is those customer lists where, where you’re able to actually say, like, here’s my people. They have consented to give me their information. If you’re going to remove the ability for us to target in any other way, we probably need to be able to have that without any ad spend cap or as a minimum, but we’ll, we’ll see.

That’s 1 big shout out to Microsoft on that end is that they did away with the minimum, even when their minimum was last. They did away with it.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Uncertainty is sort of the name of the game here. So will Google make this change? Kerri’s like, well, some of these things work well, but we don’t know how long they’re going to stay around.

So like for people watching today, like you’ve talked about CRM a bit, but Kerri, like go into what is it that you as an organization help your clients do so that they’re prepared for whatever the future may hold, like, what is that way of like owning your data?

KERRI AMODIO: Yeah. So, I mean, because we’re going to be so much more reliant on first party data, we need that data to be as clean and accurate as possible.

I can’t even tell, that’s such a huge pain point. I can’t even tell you how many clients have come on board with Closed Loop. And they’re, they tell us, Oh, our Salesforce data is just, Unreliable. Well, that’s a huge red flag because we’re probably going to need some data and insight to pull from there in order to be successful.

So honestly, that is step one. I mean, we really encourage our clients to look in their CRM and of course, clean it up, work with sales teams to make sure that that data is possible. It’s being input correctly, but also look at what data is missing. I see a lot, especially on the B2B side, that they’re getting a ton of like personal emails.

They’re getting Gmails, Yahoo’s, et cetera. Well, think about it. What can you do to increase the number of work emails that we can go after? So does that mean you’re changing how your forms are written now? You’re changing the question and asking for a work email. I know I’m LinkedIn. You can. basically require a work email on the LinkedIn lead gen forms.

Maybe you use a platform like zoom info that’s going to help you with more data matching. So really just getting that to a point where we can rely on it, because especially as we start, I know this conversation is going to go into a lot of offline conversion tracking or offline conversion imports.

Especially as we get into that conversation and we start. Start importing our backend data into these ad platforms. That is going to be essential because we, if we are not feeding it accurate, clean data, then the algorithms are just not going to do what we want them to do.

NAVAH HOPKINS: I don’t know if you’re asking me something. Yeah. I can’t hear you.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. Usually sometimes every, every show, at least once I mute myself because I’m coughing, I’ve got a little cold. No, so never any B to C perspective on strategies to get that clean data.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Well, well, there’s a couple one is.

Pretty much every ad network has set up integrations, whether you have to do it through Zapier or whether it’s a direct integration with all the major shopping platforms, there is no good reason not to link your accounts that you have that easy conversion value fed right in so that you know exactly what your ROAS is.

But then also so that you have that net new user versus existing customers. And that’s actually a setting that a lot of people. Overlook of, are you looking for net new customers or are you looking for existing? So having that data come through and having those integrations set up, we’ll really make sure that you’re setting yourself up for success, not just from a targeting standpoint and from a ROAS standpoint, but also from what does your audience pool look like?

I will say one of the biggest pitfalls that folks fall into is thinking that they do not need a CRM if they are E commerce and one of the reasons why they think that is, well, you know, I got, I got their money, it’s all good, the platform will, will keep it from or I can check Shopify, I can check WooCommerce, I can check BitCommerce, I can check them, it’s, it’s fine.

This is a mistake. Because if you’re not creating nurture programs to get those return customers back, and if you’re not building that into your workflow of how you think about the overall ROAS on your ad spend, you’re behind the eight ball. So I wouldn’t just encourage folks to think about integrating the data from a conversion tracking standpoint.

I’d also encourage folks to think about how can you capture and how can you create those user journey. Processes, not just from the initial touch, but then the returning purchase. One of my absolute favorite cases of this is actually Lumi. Lumi has a really powerful nurture program and I, I, I documented how they turned me into a customer across YouTube, Facebook, Google, like there, there was, it was a flawless process, but the thing that Stood out to me.

The most was actually that they knew to email me exactly when my product was going to run out. It wasn’t them being creepy. It wasn’t them being a stalker. It was them knowing their customer and knowing the average time when their average customer typically runs out of product, if the product is being used at a normal base.

So simple things like that will unlock so much more ROAS out of that initial spend.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. So sorry, can we continue a minute here, but. So yeah, lifetime value, I think now is what you’re talking about, right? Even in e commerce, that’s so important because your competitors, they may be valuing the conversion on a lifetime value expected basis.

And if they do that, then obviously they can pay more on a CPC basis. So they’re going to own the auction at that point. So that’s why it’s so important. And then Kerri, you had a point on that too, but I’d also like to hear from you. From maybe a B2B perspective where sometimes these are huge order sizes.

And the problem is kind of like the duration of the sales process. And maybe the repeat sales is not like a big thing, but, but talk about that a little bit.

KERRI AMODIO: Yeah. I mean, that is a huge issue that we run into with, with our B2B clients. We’re mostly in the software as a service industry. So sales cycles are very long.

The buying committees are very large. So there’s, It’s hard to collect all the data that you need and get all the signals that you need when your sales cycles could be, you know, three, six months a year. What’s really helped with that is just gathering as much data as possible and there’s so many kind of piggybacking off of what Navah said.

I mean, there’s so many more intense signals. And engagement signals than just asking somebody to fill out a form or just, you know, make a purchase or something like that. I mean, each stage of your marketing funnel has intent and engagement signals that you might not realize that you can capture, or maybe you are capturing and you’re just not looking at or utilizing.

You can really look at the actions that the users are taking starting at the top of the funnel, like who’s watching your YouTube videos, reading your blogs, listening to your podcasts. And then as they get down the funnel a bit further, you know, look at things like site engagement, time on site, number of page visits, social media engagements, website traffic.

There’s so many more things like that. Especially in the B2B world where it’s taking so many Touch points with the brand before a user is ready to convert. It’s just not enough to rely on just a form fill. So tracking like high page visit, high value page visits, like visiting a demo page or visiting a pricing page, understanding that people are taking those actions and maybe they’re just not ready to submit their information to you and raise their hand and let you know, Hey, I’m ready to talk to sales now, but you can tell they’re doing research on that end, so it looks a lot like setting up these micro conversions.

For those different types of actions that I just mentioned, building, retargeting audiences based on those type of actions and gathering KPIs on all of those different types of actions, you have the ability to set that up and measure those behavior signals and really paint a fuller picture of what is going on with your audiences, how they’re behaving, Behaving what actions they’re taking and then therefore you’re ready to serve them what they are ready for.

The, the buyer journey is just, it’s not linear. We’re, you know, we were so used to that traditional marketing funnel where, you know, we served them like a video at the top and then we asked them to fill out an ebook. Lead form. And then we asked them to you know, submit the form for a demo. I mean, in the B2B world, there are just so many options for the buying committee to consider that they might watch a video, then download an ebook, then go watch another video, then read a blog, then request a demo.

You don’t exactly know what the next step is that they’re ready for, but they might be able to tell you. So it’s very easy, maybe not easy, but it’s, you know, It’s more simple to capture insights than maybe people might think. So I really like to set up those micro conversions across every channel that I possibly can to gather as much insights as I possibly can and meet the buyer where they are and eliminate budget waste that way.

NAVAH HOPKINS: And one super easy way to do that. If you have. No clue what any of the things are, and you just want something not necessarily the, the, the most robust reporting, but just quick and easy. One of my favorite innovations from Google recently is the primary and secondary conversions. Now, granted, not enough people actually go in and make the change, but if you can go in and make that quick change of primary and secondary, it’s super easy to see that breakdown in real time in your ad account, so you don’t have to go hopping from place to place to place to place.

So if you’re curious about an insight of what is your shopping cart abandonment ratio for certain campaigns, or how often is your sales team demo connection outperforming your free trial versus your free trial outperforming, or if that white paper return segment, how, how is that doing? Be mindful that those secondary conversions.

Even though it might seem like it’s just clutter, that is a very simple and easy way to get those insights right in the ad network so that you’re able to then make those changes in real time.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, that’s really good advice. And I think Google’s come a really long way in terms of letting you show additional columns in the interface that correspond to these secondary actions.

We should probably also really briefly talk about how that impacts bidding, right? So the beauty of having a secondary action is that it doesn’t impact your smart bidding, but the majority of people. Should be doing smart bidding. And then it’s also nice because a lot of these secondary actions like Navah said, they sit in reports, but tools like Optmyzr, we also tap into this.

So now you can start building automation rules that actually take these secondary things into consideration. And if we find that a certain campaign. Even though it’s not bidding based on these signals, but something’s wrong with the signal, we can still pause it, or we can send you an email to notify you, right?

So you can really take things to the next level. And I have a saying, not enough people use these things, but that’s why you listen to the show, right? Like, what are the tidbits? And what is the one or two things that actually sets you apart? Because these are They’re small changes, but you can have a huge impact on your account.

And that’s what’s going to set you apart.

KERRI AMODIO: Yeah, I think too. That’s where UTM tracking is so, so important. I was very excited about

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: this.

NAVAH HOPKINS: I have, I have, I have. So much love for the UTM subject, but go, go, go.

KERRI AMODIO: Yeah. I was just going to say, I really like to kind of overkill the UTM tracking. Anything that we can add into UTMs, I love to have.

So add ID, keyword, content, campaign, et cetera. Every, everything that I can learn about my audience and the content they’re consuming, the device that they’re on, the keyword they searched for, I want to capture that information. And not only can we, you know, look in the CRM like Salesforce to see where that lead came from.

So now I can actually blend my data and look at the campaigns or the ads or the keywords that a MQL or even a close one deal came from, which, you Can help me make optimization decisions, but also I can look in Google analytics and learn a ton. Like maybe people that are coming from a certain campaign on display have a high bounce rate.

And, you know, now I question what’s going on with that audience. It just helps me to dig in and analyze a bit better at, at different levels of campaigns.

NAVAH HOPKINS: One quick note. I know I I’m guilty of this. I used to delegate a lot of UTM building to my Google Analytics being synced to my Google ads account.

It’s like, Oh, analytics has this covered with GA for migrations. That is 1 thing. You have to make sure that you are happy with your UTMs and how they’re set up and how everything is tracked because when you go to migrate if you lose any of that insight, it’s going to make it seem like certain conversion paths no longer make sense.

So give yourself that that period of grace. Check everything, make sure you’re happy. There’s there’s a number of free resources to help with UTM tracking parameters if you’re not sure, but I cannot. Agree more UTM parameter set up. It’s worth spending an extra day to make sure it’s perfect then to launch and not be happy, because then you will have to go back and do all the cleanup and it’s expensive from a time standpoint.

So yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

KERRI AMODIO: Sorry. I was just going to say for anybody listening, a little life hack would be go and do a Google search for Google and even Microsoft has them to value track parameters. It actually. dynamically captures things like campaign ID, ad group ID, keyword ID, ad ID, all these different IDs that like you actually don’t have to type out each and every one.

It actually just dynamically, automatically captures it for you. So definitely take a look into that.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, so I think the key message that we’ve heard so far is like collect as much data as you possibly can. I’ve heard CRM is very important. So even if you think you don’t need a CRM, you probably do in PPC.

We’ve also heard a lot now about Google Analytics. There’s obviously the migration to GA4, which Google is now basically automatically doing for you if you haven’t started it yet. So these are two great ways that you could capture all that data. But now let’s shift a little bit. Right? So we have this data and we’ve talked about a few ways to bring that back into the ad system, but where is that?

And Kerri, we’ll start with you, but like, what’s sort of the big picture on you got all this stuff, you know, now you’ve talked a little bit about insights, so like I now understand this brand campaign or this display campaign is doing X, Y, and Z, but how do you start bringing that back into something that’s actionable on the ad platform side?

KERRI AMODIO: So as excited as Navah just got about her fist pumping with UTM tracking, that’s how I feel about offline conversion tracking. Very excited about that topic. So offline conversion tracking is really the act of telling the ad platform, such as Google, what is going on in your CRM or whatever backend platform you’re using.

So in, in short, just to describe what’s happening, every single click Gets assigned a Google click ID. Every single ad click gets assigned a Google click ID or a GCLID for short. That that GCLID is captured by your CRM when somebody converts and then gets pushed back through offline conversion tracking, it gets pushed back from your CRM into the ad platform.

And in that way, we can actually tell Google. Who our MQLs from the B2B side, I’m explaining who our MQLs, our SQLs are, are closed one, et cetera. Every single funnel stage can be imported into Google. And in that way, we can start optimizing for that. I have a client right now who I probably about six months ago made the shift from optimizing for just like front end website conversions to optimizing for their front end.

Full funnel CRM data. And they actually saw a 25 percent dip in cost per MQL, not even cost per lead cost per marketing qualified leads. It was such a game changer for them. And they’re definitely never looking back. So

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: just to be clear on this, so we’re doing automated bidding.

KERRI AMODIO: Automated bidding. So we were actually leveraging just to start out a TCPA bidding strategy.

So we were leveraging smart bidding, but what we’ve done now, since we, we’ve found out that optimizing just for those OCT conversions alone is really working. We are now testing value based bidding. So we are leveraging, yay, some claps. We are leveraging a max conversion value bidding strategy across some campaigns where we’re seeing that work well.

And then we’re also leveraging a TRO as a bidding strategy on some campaigns where that’s performing well, because you can’t treat every single campaign the same. And the way that that works is we are actually able to upload the actual value of every single lead. That goes into their sales force, and we are able to optimize based on those values.

Meaning a enterprise size company with a larger deal is going to have a much, much higher value. So we are able to tell Google, please prioritize this type of lead. We want to close more deals like this. We want to generate more leads like this, and it has really helped to move. The needle. And that the clients have been very, very happy.

I will say that there’s, there’s some pain points that can happen when getting it set up. I think the best piece of advice I have would be to get your marketing ops team involved, get your web dev team involved because there is a bit of coding that needs to be done. If you have a custom Salesforce instance, sometimes it can be tricky.

There is a manual import. If you’re not able to do like a Salesforce to Google or a HubSpot to Google direct connection, you can do a manual import, which I’ve seen work just as well. So there are options

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: and ultimately the exact method you used to do the import doesn’t matter so much as the fact that you actually do it.

Now, Kerri, I have a follow up question on this. So you value your deals based on whether it’s an enterprise or not an enterprise customer. I’m sure there’s a bunch of other factors. How often do you revise and how quickly do you inform Google about that value, right? Because of Google initially, when the GCLID is set, they kind of get the point that there’s a conversion here.

And then probably at some later point, you’re restating the value to, to tell Google, this was a better lead. This was not quite as good of a lead, and that’s one way to do it. Maybe that’s not how you’re doing it right, but it’s a tough a little bit more about like. The cadence, how frequently you update and how soon you tell Google.

KERRI AMODIO: Yeah. So if we were doing the automatic upload, the, the integration with, through the API Google would be receiving that information once a day. So pretty, almost not necessarily real time, but very often you have

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: your CRMs like scoring in real time or. So because there’s some dependency probably on when the salesperson goes and logs, okay, this is an enterprise deal, this is probably this value.

KERRI AMODIO: Exactly. So any change that a salesperson made throughout that day would now be updated the next day in Google. If it gets updated in the CRM, it’s getting pushed to Google. So that way it knows if you started out as an MQL, but you’re now progressing down the funnel toward SQL as they all closed one, it’s going to follow you through that journey.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. Sorry, I have a lot of questions on

KERRI AMODIO: this

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: topic too. But so in that case, MQL to SQL, do you tend to feed a new conversion into Google or do you take the existing conversion and then sort of boost the value on that one?

KERRI AMODIO: The GCLID is going to be the same. Because it’s a unique identifier that is assigned to one person.

So Google is going to recognize that it is that same person and take that into account. So I don’t believe that it would double count that.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Well, I mean, that’s optional, right? So basically what you can do is you can take it and you can create a new conversion for it that says, okay, we’ve now reached. The SQL stage, so maybe we boost me, we give it a new conversion.

And so Google is, and then again, then you have to look at primary and secondary conversions. But if both of them are primary, they will both count towards smart bidding. Or you can do the other way, which is just restating the value continuously of that original conversion that was associated. Yes.

KERRI AMODIO: Okay. I see what you’re saying. So. They have, this is actually a special case where the sales team actually does not put in the actual value until they get to a meeting scheduled stage, at which case we know what the value is because they’re inputting it. It could change over time if the deal size is changing.

But what’s interesting about this example is that we have no actual values at the MQL stage because of that, because they put the value in at the next stage. So we’re missing that data. So because we’re doing a manual import for this client, what we’re able to do is in this, in the spreadsheet that we upload to Google, we are actually looking at the the market segment or the company size that this person came from.

And we are assigning it, for example, a small to medium sized business. MQL gets 10. It’s worth 10 versus a enterprise. Size MQL is worth 50. So in that way, we are influencing the algorithms and pushing it toward the right direction. Once that person now gets to the, I’m scheduled stage, which is the meeting scheduled stage, that is when they will start to Google will start to recognize, Oh, wow, this is a very important sale.

There’s a lot of value here.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: What I love about what you’re saying, and I think a lot of people need to take this too hard. It’s like, you don’t need to have the exact value. You just need to have a little bit of a difference so that Google knows like, ah, this was slightly better than that, than that. That steers the ship in the right direction.

And then as you actually figure out what is the true value, then you can communicate that back, but that’s not critical to the equation here.

KERRI AMODIO: Right. The actual value is definitely ideal, but it works very well still if you just have dynamic values and just assign Assign values yourself in a, in just a static way.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Now, I’d love to hear from you. So I think this is kind of like B2B longer sales cycles. You have a sales team ECL and has convergence for leads OCI offline conversion, import OCT offline conversion tracking. Like, are you recommending that for a B2C scenario as well?

NAVAH HOPKINS: Always so, and this is where I think all all 3 of us were very much aligned.

So it’s less of a debate and it’s more of a, yes, yes, do all the things. But what’s what’s really interesting about B2C versus B2B is that there is. Unless you’re e commerce, there is a hesitation to actually put the work in to understand what the value of your customer is. I think one of the things that B2B tends to have in its favor is a lot more intelligence in terms of, you know, Not that the company is an intelligence, but there’s a width and breadth of deal size of data science that can go into formulating an average value.

Whereas there are some brands in the B2C space that might have too much too much of a variable, or they may not feel comfortable committing to a value. One of the things I was really happy to hear the first thing on this conversation is, let’s look at customer value, because that is the easiest way to tell the platform who your people are that you value and who are the people that are maybe not as valuable.

And one of the things that you can definitely do to kind of jerry rig a system is look at, do you do better business talking to a person or coming through your site? Do you do better business when someone comes from 1 zip code or another? 1 of the things I actually really love about local service ads, which I realize is kind of a left field, but but it’s it’s still relevant because you’re still it is a Google product and you are still.

getting those customers is that, that proximity based piece. And one of the things that’s, that’s actually kind of interesting about local services that I think more people should carry over into their traditional Google campaigns is the amount of locations that you actually ask the campaign to support.

A lot of campaigns are asked to support lots of locations and those locations might have different values of different customers with different buying intents and different margins for, for your CS organization to support. And if you know that certain regions are going to be more valuable, you should commit to that.

So it’s not just about trusting in the automation. You absolutely should. Smart bidding is fantastic. There’s a number of rules that you can put in place. Shameless plug for some Optmyzr functionality that will also help with rules and evaluation of your conversions. But there’s also some manual things you can do too that are super easy.

Just by segmenting your campaigns by, you know, The margins that those prospective customers will support, you’ll, you’ll see a huge lift. And again, it doesn’t have to be perfect, not to have the exact numbers, but, but be mindful that every time you ask a campaign to do a thing, it’s going to do the thing.

And if you ask it to do 10 things, it might do one thing passably and everything else will be mediocre. So Segment out your initiatives, feed in the data, and you’ll see success.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Exactly. And that’s one of the key points about automation is a lot of people are like, Ooh, smart bidding, Ooh, performance max campaigns, like let it do its thing.

And then they miscommunicate what they truly want the business to achieve. And like the biggest thing to me is if you put it on maximize conversion value as a bit strategy, Where’s the word profit in that? Well, there is no mention of profit. It’s about maximizing your revenue, which means you’re going to have zero profit at the end of the day.

Was that your goal? Maybe in which case it’s great. But if you actually care about profit, well, then you have to know how to tweak these systems. And so like Navah saying, maybe you should segment your campaigns based on margin, profit margin. That’s one lower. And I think there’s also a spectrum, right?

So carry on the very, you know, the intelligent side, the B2B lead gen, they have to do things that are a little bit different than what you would typically do on the B2C side. So they might go into offline conversion imports, which you have to get the engineering team behind it. You have to figure out how to get the GCLID into the CRM system.

By the way, enhanced conversions for leads reduces that complexity because the key is no longer the Google Click ID. The key becomes your customer’s email address. And so it simplifies things quite a bit, right? But there’s that spectrum. But if you want to do simpler things, then we’re talking about what Navah’s talking about, which is Conversion value rules.

It’s a thing in Google or an Optmyzr where you can literally go and say, well, if I get a lead and it’s from, you know, Minnesota, maybe I don’t value it as highly as a lead from Wisconsin. I think

NAVAH HOPKINS: it gets Minnesota

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: by the way. That’s why I use Minnesota. All right. That is nothing. I’m not going to do the classic, I don’t know what kind of dynamics are going on there, but just as an example.

And like you’re saying, if you’re a local service ad and you have a plumbing business, like, yeah, you probably value those leads that are closer to home and. Maybe you work out a state once in a while, but that’s probably not quite as good of a lead. So, so very simple ways that you can do this, these things and connect that data back into the ad engines.

Now, the, the final thing, and then Kerri, it looks like you want to say something and then I want to shift after that to the final portion, which is cross platform. Kerri, go ahead.

KERRI AMODIO: Yeah. So I was just going to say, just to piggyback off the same conversation in on the B2B side, as we. Try to test these different tactics and campaign types like performance max and dynamic search and things like that, where we are losing control.

I honestly don’t like testing them without offline conversion tracking. I think that it’s so important. I think that, you know, in, in order to optimize for the highest quality possible and eliminate budget waste, it’s essential to have offline conversion tracking set up for those things.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Couldn’t agree more.

You know, it’s, it’s one of the three tenets of working with automation. Basically, you have to feed it correct data. Otherwise it’s going to go and do something that you didn’t want it to do. But yeah, so how do you bring this across platforms now? Right. So we have GCLID, which works with Google.

Microsoft has their own MS click ID. But is there anything as we start collecting this first party data where we can sort of take a broader perspective and say, Oh, we learned this from our Google campaigns, let’s go and do something on our Facebook campaigns with it.

KERRI AMODIO: Yeah. So first of all, kicking off with just the offline conversion piece of it, I would say the social channels are just not as advanced.

Facebook does have a conversions API. In my opinion, it’s not. been a bit of a struggle to get some clients on it. I think there’s just some technical issues at the moment. I’m hoping that they get there soon, but I just find that it’s not as easy to get implemented as the Facebook and the Google and Microsoft side.

LinkedIn is not quite there yet. You are able to upload a list. of conversions offline conversions that did take place and you can view them in the platform, but the algorithms are not taking them into consideration for for optimization decisions. So just to start there, we’re definitely like, not in the same place.

I think Google definitely has the best offer out there for when it comes to offline conversions. But just talking about. A cross channel strategy. I mean, one of the, the, my favorite things to do is you’re able to build an audience, especially I, I’ve, we should have turned this into a drinking game or something.

Every time I say B2B, you take a drink, but especially on the B2B side, cheers. We are able to get insights. into who our audiences are via LinkedIn, even if we’re not running LinkedIn ads. So in your LinkedIn ads account, you are able to build a retargeting audience. So say I want to track everybody that came in on the UTM equals paid search, for example.

So I want to track everybody that Came to the website via paid search. They have a tool called website demographics that allows you to actually look into the company name, the company size, the industry, et cetera, the job titles, job functions. There’s so many features that you are able to go in and see the types of people that came in from that channel, or even from that tactic, however you want to build that that audience.

And it’s so insightful and it really helps you. Not only just show your clients value of, you know, Hey, we are making the right decisions and we’re doing the right things and we’re reaching the right people, but you can also advocate for more budget. Hey, let’s push more budget here. We are definitely reaching the right people.

And I think that goes back to what we were saying earlier about, like, it’s not enough to ask somebody to download an ebook sometimes and take that conversion action. It’s really helpful to understand that the right people at the very least are clicking. So that’s just one kind of cross channel strategy that I, I love to leverage.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: That’s right now, but what about so

NAVAH HOPKINS: so 1 thing that I don’t think Microsoft gets enough credit for is their audience planner. And what’s really interesting about their audience planner is that you will be able to see the audiences that you’re trying to go after and how much they represent the total pool of the Microsoft advertising ecosystem.

And so, as you are thinking about. Your, your KPIs as you’re thinking about how to structure budgets as you’re thinking about how to structure tests Microsoft will actually tell you. This is the, the percentage that this group that you want to go after is, is our total pool. And why I like that so much.

Microsoft. Acknowledges that it’s not going to be your first play. You’re going to be importing your Google account. You’re going to be importing your Facebook account. Like it’s, you’re going to typically not build Microsoft first. The way that they have their audiences set up in the access and within breadth that they have their audience segmentation set up is really robust and, and, and powerful.

So what I would definitely recommend for those of you that have not advertised on Microsoft before, definitely check it out. It’s that it’s not. A waste of time, it’s, it’s a perfectly viable network, but also vouchers,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: right? If you’re, yeah, we got, we got vouchers. Yeah.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Yeah. The, the, the, the, the reason I bring it up is not the vouchers.

The reason I bring it up is, although they’re great is, you will be then be able to take those demographic percentages and see, okay, if I’m going to run this here. The, the core behaviors are still going to be the same another network. So you can get that intelligence. And bring that back to Google and bring that back to LinkedIn and bring that back to Facebook.

I also strongly recommend for those of you that do use tools like say HubSpot where you can see that full customer journey and how it’s integrated. Absolutely do so. But yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s a number of ways that you can paint the full, the full customer journey. And it’s, it’s not a B2B thing.

It’s not a B2C thing. It’s an intelligent, intelligent.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great. So, yeah, lots of good advice in this whole episode, but we’re we’re coming close to time here. So Kerri, maybe we’ll start with you. Is there anything we haven’t covered that you think we should talk about or how do people get ahold of you and get some of your amazing work on their accounts?

KERRI AMODIO: Yeah, I think we covered so much today. Such a great conversation. I mean, I think just to reiterate, it’s just capture as much as you can keep your data clean, set up those micro conversions, leverage UTM tracking There, there’s just so much that you can do outside of the old third party tracking methods that can really help us to move forward today.

Definitely check out Closed Loops, the website, follow us on social media. You can follow me as well. At Carrie emotio on Twitter. We’re also always posting the, the latest news on these types of topics and very similar. So I was just very excited to be here today. I have lovely meeting you Napa and hanging out with you again, Fred.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. And Neva, what’s what about you? Any final closing thoughts before we sign off?

NAVAH HOPKINS: Simply that B2B and B2C, you should not be afraid to take lessons learned from both. The things that are helpful and meaningful in B2B are just as helpful in B2C and vice versa. Yes, Economies of scale might be different.

Yes, there, there might be some differences in the sales cycle itself, but the core strategies and the core mechanics of how we are able to meaningfully capture data, feed it back in how we’re able to build consent oriented audiences. It’s, it’s the same idea, so absorb all information. Don’t be hard on yourself.

If you can’t implement it all. One step at a time. It’s, it’s all good. And there are tools available to help you like Optmyzr. And, and you can always follow us for, for more on PPC town hall. Check us out on Twitter, LinkedIn.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Some people were to find you on your personal handles.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Yep. So my personal ones are at Navah F.

You can also find me on LinkedIn. As well as the monthly ask the PPC column on search engine journal. And then I’m also a contributor for search engine land. So I’m always happy to help any questions that you might have.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, you’re everywhere. Also going to a couple of conferences. Carrie, what about your personal handles and LinkedIn?

Is that a good place to connect as well?

KERRI AMODIO: Yeah, absolutely. Find me on on LinkedIn. I know we’ll be sharing my profile once this goes live, I’m sure. But yeah, I also am a search engine land contributor as well. So keep an eye out for some of my contributions there.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: We want to have that first party relationship with every one of you watching, so connect with us on LinkedIn.

Great. Well, this has been an amazing episode, Carrie and Navah. Thank you so much for joining us now she’s an Optmyzr, didn’t mention the tool quite a bit, so I didn’t have to do it, which was lovely. And we also work quite a bit with Closed Loops, so they are great as well. If you need services, they’re also customer of ours.

But if you want to check out Optmyzr yourself. We have a two week free trial, so take advantage of that. And then if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please use the buttons below to subscribe and get notified when we have the next one, this has been episode number 70, and we’re looking forward to you know, being on the path to 100 as we celebrate 10 years of Optmyzr.

So thank you all for watching. Thank you both for joining us as panelists and we’ll see you for the next episode.