How to Boost B2B Leads From PPC and Landing Pages by 9x · 2017-10-09 · Most B2B PPC campaigns...
Transcript of How to Boost B2B Leads From PPC and Landing Pages by 9x · 2017-10-09 · Most B2B PPC campaigns...
CASE STUDYHow to Boost B2B
Leads From PPC and Landing Pages by 9x
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CONTENTS
04 IDENTIFYING THE ISSUES
THE RESULTS
IMPLEMENTING THE SOLUTION09
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INTRODUCTION
Do you ever dream about increasing your conversion rate? How about
increasing it by 290 percent and boosting your lead generation by 9x?
Well, that’s exactly what we did for our client, Revecent, a company
specializing in sales consulting and recruiting.
Today, I’m going to show you exactly how we did it, and how you can
achieve the same results by following key PPC and landing page best
practices. Ready to start making more money than you ever thought
possible from your B2B PPC campaigns? Let’s dig in!
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IDENTIFYING THE ISSUES
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Most B2B PPC campaigns have poor conversion rates and ROI. This
usually happens because the campaign is not set up using best
practices, is not managed using a disciplined process, and does not
use optimized landing pages. In fact 52 percent of B2B PPC ads still
point to home pages.
Indeed, when we first looked at our client’s old Google AdWords
campaign for recruiting services, we saw each one of these issues in
play.
Their overall conversion rate of 2.83 percent, while above average for a
B2B campaign, was still nothing to write home about. And the high cost
per conversion didn’t produce many quality leads thus preventing the
client from scaling up their campaign.
While there were many issues, we focused on four key areas for our
plan of attack:
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1. Poor Account Structure
One of the biggest issues in the campaign was that they had only three ad
groups with 40 to 50 keywords each. This resulted in poor quality scores
and poor message match between ads and keywords. Here is an example
of one such ad and the variety of different keywords triggering that ad:
Your ads (and landing pages) can never be relevant for so many different
keywords. So, you should only have a handful of keywords in an ad
group, and ideally, just one keyword per ad group.
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2. No Special Landing Pages
Rather than develop specific landing pages for the campaign, the client
chose to use one of their service pages as a landing page. As you can
see below, it had a number of issues including conflicting Calls-to-
Action, multiple navigation links, and some pretty blasé content and
design:
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3. Wasted Ad Spend
Even considering their modest budget, the campaign was very
inefficient — only 10 percent of the keywords had conversions and 90
percent of conversions came from 30 percent of their total ad spend.
4. Inadequate Keyword Management
With all their ad groups combined, the entire campaign had only 130
keywords. Plus, they weren’t regularly identifying and adding new
keywords. While the client did implement a few negative keywords,
there was room for a lot more in order to improve the quality of their
traffic.
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IMPLEMENTING THE SOLUTION
IMPLEMENTING THE SOLUTION
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We came up with a three-step plan to optimize the PPC campaign:
Use best practices to structure the account, create conversion
optimized landing pages, and use a disciplined process to manage
the campaign and realize ongoing improvements.
1. PPC Best Practices to Set up the Campaign
First, we spent time understanding the client’s business in detail—
going through their services, industries they serve, ideal customers,
and competitors. Based on this, we conducted extensive research
to brainstorm some quality keywords for their campaign.
Using the Google Keywords Tool, we identified the best keyword
opportunities including niche keywords around specific industries
like Software, SaaS, and Technology as well as keywords
containing metro areas like Chicago, NYC, and San Francisco. We
poured through the Search Terms Report from the client’s old
campaigns and extracted some excellent keywords from there as
well as a host of negative keywords. We also used the SpyFu tool to
look at which keywords competitors were using and then extracted
some of those as well.
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Next, we set up an account structure that would give us a solid
platform for the campaign. We created a structure of single-
keyword ad groups for keywords accounting for around 90 percent
of the expected traffic to the campaign. This resulted in about 80 ad
groups. Our approach would give us the most control over the
campaign, ensuring precise message match between keywords
and ads, high quality scores and click-through rates, while keeping
keyword cost-per click at a reasonable level—even for the top three
ad slots.
Below are three examples of the ad groups we created.
Ad Group Sales Recruiters Dallas:
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Ad Group Software Sales Recruiters:
Ad Group Sales Recruiting Agencies:
We rewrote all the ad copy to properly convey the client’s main benefits with
lines such as “Build an All Star B2B Sales Team” and “Targeted & Vetted
Candidates Only.” We also added sitelinks, callouts, and call ad extensions.
Finally, we added a number of negative keywords in each ad group to make sure
that any keyword searched on Google would only match one ad group. For
example, in our “Sales Recruiters” ad group, we added “Dallas”, “Software”,
“Agencies” and a host of other terms as negative keywords.
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2. Conversion Optimized Landing Page Design
Using Unbounce, we created a new landing page, employing best
practices for landing page design. Instead of creating multiple
pages with content customized to associated ad groups, we opted
to use dynamic text replacement to change the content of a few key
areas of the landing page.
The key elements of our landing page were as follows:
• Tagline below logo emphasizing focus on Sales Recruiting
• Phone number integrating with Google call tracking so we could
track phone calls being made from this page
• Customer testimonial
• Prominently placed form
• Clear Call-to-action and moving arrow to attract attention
• Customer logos to build trust
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• Tracking of UTM parameters so we could record the campaign,
keyword, device, and keyword match type
In addition to the above, we created a headline and subheading
that effectively described what the client does and what the main
benefits of the service are. Using dynamic text replacement, we
were able to change the entire headline based on which ad the
user clicked on. We also used dynamic text parameters for a
portion of the subheading and section headings.
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For example, the “Software Sales Recruiters” ad had the following
content. The bolded, italicized portion represents the dynamic
portion of the content.
• Headline: Hire Top Notch Software Sales Professionals Today
• Subheading: We recruit the best software sales professionals in
your industry. Candidates are assessed based on 21 sales
specific skills common among top 20% performers to ensure
success.
• Section heading: Outsource Your Sales Hiring to Expert Software
Sales Recruiters
Once we had our account set up the way we wanted and the main
landing page ready to go, we launched the campaign.
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3. Ongoing Optimization and A/B Testing
Even if you use best practices to set up a campaign, things may not
always go as planned. Real-world performance can throw a few
curve balls. In our case, while we did find that our campaign was
performing a lot better than the old campaign, there were a few
things that needed to be adjusted.
4. Negative Keywords
Our campaign was getting lot of traffic from irrelevant keywords.
These keywords were either not related to the client’s business or
they were top of the funnel/informational searches which were not
a priority for us in this campaign. So, we went into the Search Terms
Report in AdWords and added these as negative keywords. You can
see examples of some of these on the next page.
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5. New Keywords
On the other hand, we found dozens of new keywords that people
were searching for that we hadn’t used in the campaign. We added
these keywords into new ad groups in the campaign to maximize
their effectiveness:
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6. A/B Testing
We started out with two ads in the ad groups receiving the most
traffic and continued to A/B test until we found a winner. Then, we
created a new variant and tested that against this winner and
continued this process to improve click-through rates. We also
created a variant of the landing page with a different CTA and a
different headline that included a number (as these tend to perform
better).
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7. Bid Optimization
We employed a manual CPC based bid strategy throughout, which
gave us the most control over the bidding process. We also
monitored and optimized bids regularly to maintain a top three
average position with most ads.
8. Lead Quality
Our client wanted to make sure that we minimized leads from job
candidates. They also were not interested in getting leads from
companies looking for part-time help or commission-only sales
reps. Most leads specified what they were looking for in the
description box on the form. We used this in conjunction with the
search term used by the lead to identify keywords that were
responsible for such leads. Based on this, we would either pause
those keywords or modify the ad copy.
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THE RESULTSTHE RESULTS
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As you can see in the table below, our new campaign performed
exceptionally well compared to the old campaign. We were able to
realize immediate performance gains and, because of the low cost
per lead, the client asked us to scale up the campaign quickly.
In all, the new campaign was able to:
• Reduce Cost Per Conversion by 78 percent - From $183.13 in the
old campaign down to an outstanding $39.85
• Improve Conversion Rate by 290 percent - From 2.83 percent to
11.04 percent, which is outstanding for a bottom-of-the-funnel,
B2B offer
• Boost conversions from 33 to 308 in the same time frame
• Improve the Lead to Opportunity conversion rate from 10 percent
to 25 percent
We achieved our results by following best practices for
campaign setup and landing page design, and by employing
a disciplined process for ongoing optimization after the initial
launch. Although it took a considerable amount of time to set
up the original campaign structure, this approach allowed us
to get the perfect search term + ad copy + landing page
message match. In the end, we were able to create a solid,
highly scalable platform for sustained growth.
CONCLUSIONCONCLUSION