A B2B technology company
B2B technology · seven-figure annual paid search budget
3.1× pipeline from bidding on pipeline, not leads
We moved paid search bidding from lead volume to sales-accepted opportunities with the deal value attached. A year later, quarterly pipeline was about three times where it started.
The receipts.
$1.06M in the first quarter of the engagement, $3.33M in the same quarter a year later, from the client's CRM. It stayed within about 10% of that level for the next two quarters.
$7.8K to $14.9K. Opportunity count rose 65% while average value nearly doubled, so most of the gain came from deal size. We haven't isolated how much of that the bidding change caused.
$2.18 to $4.92 of pipeline (not revenue) per media dollar, on 40% more spend. Cost per opportunity fell 15%.
Where it started.
Leads stopped predicting pipeline.
The account was optimized for lead volume, and lead count had stopped predicting pipeline.
Too many keywords.
About 1,500 active keywords, with only 6% of them converting.
The wrong bidding target.
Bidding optimized to form fills, which favored low-cost leads regardless of quality.
Three answers to one question.
Three attribution models running side by side, each giving a different number.
What we did.
Cut the account down.
We rebuilt it as brand, non-brand and competitor campaigns and removed about 90% of the keywords.
Changed what Google bids on.
We picked one target, sales-accepted opportunities, because sales already counted that stage as pipeline. Brand campaigns passed each opportunity's dollar value into Google, so bidding could favor larger deals.
Read results on a four-week lag.
Google's lag report said 92% of opportunities booked within 7 days of the click. That report only counts conversions already recorded, so recent clicks look complete when they aren't. Tracking fixed groups of clicks over time showed opportunities took about four weeks to book. We stopped reading anything younger than that.
Kept bidding fed when tracking broke.
When the pipeline data feed to Google broke, conversions reaching Google fell to almost nothing for a month. We set up a weekly CRM upload with hashed contact data and click IDs, and nearly every record was accepted.
- Value-based bidding
- Opportunity-stage conversion tracking
- Click-cohort lag analysis
- Offline conversion upload
- Account restructure
- B2B technology
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