to make PPC automation work in lead generation

At SMX Next, November, I had the honor of giving a talk about making automation work for lead-generation when it wasn’t designed.

We are grateful to everyone who attended the overtime Q&A. It was lively and filled with questions.

Lead generation automation challenges

Many of us have to deal with lead generation in an ecommerce-oriented advertising system. B2B lead generation differs from ecommerce in that it has fewer conversions, no shopping carts and a longer sales cycle.

Automation can only work well if there is a lot of data. The minimum number of conversions a month should be at least 20. Automation is difficult because many B2B campaigns fail to achieve this number.

Bid strategies such as tROAS are also based on the conversion value:

How can you price a B2B lead which won’t close in 18 months?

There are several automation options available for lead generation

One option for lead generation advertisers is Target CPA (tCPA). Target CPA (tCPA) is smart bidding strategy. It sets bids to maximize conversions (customer actions).

Maximize Conversions is a great option if you don’t have an established target CPA. It will allow you to convert as many as you want with your budget and without considering CPA.

At first glance, Max conversions and tCPA seem like ideal candidates to automate lead generation. They are good, but not perfect.

One thing is that both bid strategies can lead to CPCs skyrocketing as the automation system attempts to convert at your target CPA or just the conversions period.

Advertisers can manage their CPCs as long as they use a portfolio bidding strategy.

You can also set a maximum CPC limit for portfolio bidding using Google Ads. You can also use this option in Search Ads 360 (SA360), when you are using that:

Portfolio bid strategies are able to allow you to set maximum bids. You can avoid paying hundreds of dollars per click.

You want to make sure you are correctly tracking conversions if you tell a machine to convert as many as possible.

An example was given by a client who was using page lands to track conversions:

Page lands is a business goal. This is especially true for advertisers who are looking to build brand awareness or increase brand awareness. However, this goal is not appropriate for automation.

You’ll drive more traffic to your website if you want to maximize conversions. Traffic to your site may not result in increased leads or revenue, but there is no guarantee.

Build your funnel

It can be difficult for B2B lead generators to generate enough leads to feed an automation algorithm, as we have already mentioned.

I shared some ways that advertisers can use mid-funnel strategies to drive traffic to retarget later and possibly even drive leads at a lower cost.

One of these options is Discovery Campaigns.

Discovery campaigns are an effective middle-funnel strategy for reaching large audiences at scale. For several of our B2B clients, we’ve had success using Discovery ads.

During the session, there were many questions about Discovery. Many questions were focused on lead quality in Discovery campaigns.

Our clients receive Discovery leads of similar quality to search campaigns.

Even though Discovery ads reach users higher up the funnel than search, keep in mind that Discovery’s only bidding options are Max conversions and tCPA. The lead quality is generally high.

We have also discovered that Discovery campaigns outperform Performance Max campaign – to the extent that we seldom use Performance Max due low lead quality.

Quality leads

Lead generation marketers face the greatest challenge in generating quality leads that convert into sales.

Online forms can be filled out by anyone. Many people who fill out forms online will never be qualified leads.

Only a few qualified leads eventually become salespeople.

Importing third-party data can help you gauge the quality and reliability of your leads.

In 2016, Google launched the ability to import Salesforce lead data. They’ve since added thousands of data connectors for advertisers to pull data from their CRM.

Importing data from the same system that your clients use to gauge lead quality allows you to go beyond form fills and see how many form submissions have been converted into leads.

If you have enough leads from third parties, Smart Bidding can be made possible.

This is a screenshot from SA360. However, offline conversions can be used for Google Ads bid strategies if they are marked Primary conversions.

This will require approximately 20 conversions per monthly. However, if you have enough leads it can be a great way for your clients to get the actions they need most.

A portfolio bid strategy allows you to combine campaigns to create a single strategy. It also provides enough conversion data to allow for smart bidding.

Make sure that the campaigns achieve similar goals and performance. Do not combine non-brand and brand campaigns, or campaigns with different CPAs.

Even if you don’t have enough third-party converts for smart bidding purposes, you can still use the data to gauge lead strength.

One example is a client who wants to learn SQLs. They only receive about 10 SQLs per year.

MQLs are one step up from SQLs and we optimize for them. To determine if a campaign is driving leads that matter to the client, we also import SQL data.

Some campaigns drive lots of MQLs, but not SQLs. We can de-prioritize campaigns that generate a lot of MQLs but not enough SQLs.

Using lead value in conjunction with tROAS bid strategies

Lead generation advertisers are often jealous of ecommerce advertisers because they can use the tROAS bid strategy to maximize not only the sales but also the value of those sales.

Lead generation can be difficult because of the length of time it takes for a lead become a sale. In B2B, sales cycles can last from 18 months to two years.

It is difficult to assess the value of a lead prior to it going through the entire buying cycle. Many B2B marketers consider tROAS a strategy.

But not so quickly!

A good way to use the tROAS bid strategy is to assign a relative value for micro-conversions such as whitepaper downloads or filling out contact forms.

Let’s suppose you have four actions to measure: video views and asset downloads, forms fills, and MQLs derived from a third party import.

Each of these actions can be assigned a relative value, such as:

An MQL, in this case, is worth 1000 times more than a video.

The tROAS strategy will maximize conversions and not just their number. It will prioritise MQLs, form fills over asset downloads and video views, improving the quality of leads it generates.

This strategy was the subject of some great questions during the SMX session.

One attendee wanted to know how to avoid the “loop” where high volumes of low-value leads are driven by the system and never become MQLs. This could be a problem.

This can be avoided by assigning low enough values for low-value activities and high enough value to high-value acts. The system will then work harder to drive high-value actions. In my example, I assigned a 1,000 value to MQLs.

Sometimes even that is not enough. For example, video views are so simple to generate, that it may be easier for the system to generate thousands of views than one MQL.

You can remove video views from the primary conversion. Instead, force the system to search for higher-value actions like form fills and asset downloads.

A related question was raised about data-drivenattribution.

“We have several primary conversion actions in the account that are based on different client goals, such as page views, form fills and calls. The higher funnel actions have been a contributing factor to our lead generation actions. We noticed that the data-driven model has had an impact on our lead gen actions. What approach would you suggest for data-driven lead generation attribution with multiple conversion actions?

This is a sign that you need to change your primary goals and focus on secondary ones.

Data-driven attribution will still look at secondary goals, but it won’t (since it examines all interactions, clicks), at least you are telling the machine that these actions don’t matter as much to you.

Using tROAS will also allow you to tell the system which conversions are most important in your case.

It all comes down to signals

Automation is only as good and effective as the signals it gets. Marketers have to make sure we give the right signals to the model to get meaningful results.

Do not forget the basics, such as audiences and negative keywords.

Advertisers often neglect to add audiences for observation. It’s a great way for advertisers to inform the system who you are interested in reaching and, in the case negative audiences, to let them know which users they don’t want you to reach.

Not only are they important for preventing ads from appearing on irrelevant queries, but they also provide another signal to the machine.

The key takeaways

Automation can be used for lead generation with the right tools.

Make automation work for lead generation

Here is the entire video of my SMX Next presentation.

Search Engine Land first published the post Making PPC Automation Work for Lead Gen.

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