Over the past 5 years, we have witnessed the shift to increasingly online-only shopping, particularly during the last year or so. Groceries, daily-use items and electronics alike – people are buying almost everything from the comfort of their homes, even brand new homes and cars. Google data reflects just that.
In fact, in Q4 of 2020, Google reported that the YoY growth rate in retail searches was more than three times the rate compared to Q4 in 2019. In these unprecedented times, people are using Google as a primary shopping point to meet a variety of needs, billions of times per day across the entire world.
Let’s visualise this for a moment: your deck needs repairs, but you can’t find any good contractors after consulting with friends, colleagues or neighbours. Plus, you feel uncomfortable with the idea of multiple sales people visiting your home just to assess the work.
The good news is its 2021, so you start searching online for good solutions. You check their websites and locations on maps. You select a few good candidates and send your repair and maintenance specs, along with a few snaps, to a couple of landscaping vendors – many of whom provide quotes without the need for a home visit. You find the contractor that best fits your requirements, they do a great job, and you even recommend them to one of your friends.
This is merely one example of how lead-generation marketers now (more than ever) need to do everything possible to connect with customers online. In a recent Google survey, almost 1/3rd people said that they are more comfortable buying services from a brand that offers multiple options to connect with them.
This calls for an urgent need (much more urgent than previously thought) to drive lead quality without sacrificing lead volume – simply because lead nurturing traditionally happens offline – e.g. through phone or email, or a face-to-face with a customer.
Therefore, following up with too many low-quality leads can be highly time-intensive and prove costly. You simply can’t afford to slow down your business working on poor quality leads. But how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?
At Orca Online, we partner with marketers and business owners to overcome precisely these kinds of challenges. Here’s how:
Google Ads is a well known solution for generating quality leads online and gives you the ability to connect your offline customer data with your online campaigns, including leads which resulted in a sale and other first-party data. And this is important to understand the unique customer types which bring the best value to your business.
In addition to Google Ads’ powerful campaign tools, we offer specialised tools to automatically drive high-quality leads at scale, by reaching similar customers throughout their journey. Here’s an example to put it into context:
Let’s assume you have an online product or platform which provides businesses with recruitment, HR and payroll solutions. After partnering with us, you’ll be driving valuable leads using powerful automation tools.
We’ll first use offline conversion import to upload all your closed leads and include revenue from deals as the conversion increases in value. We’ll then implement the most suitable bidding strategy, eg. a ‘target return on ad spend’ automated bid strategy (tROAS) to help you find more valuable customers. As a result, your deals will increase by an estimated 200+ percent with an ROAS increase of 26 percent.
Our solutions are geared towards helping you generate more high quality leads, namely through measurement, strong creatives and innovative campaign strategies.
Automated products are capable of driving strong performance, but the advertiser needs to play an active role in setting the foundation for success. In our experience, automation performs best when you ‘close the loop’ on how the leads are performed. We’ll help you do this in the following ways:
Tell us how the leads performed in your sales funnel using offline conversion import (OCI). Bid strategies like Target CPA and Target ROAS utilise that conversion data along with auction time signals to help you capture qualified leads. Including each conversion’s value in your uploads enables maximised conversion value and Target ROAS bidding to generate leads which may potentially be more valuable to your business.
We’ll help you use first-party data only for acquiring quality leads – any data you collect directly from your customers with their consent throughout the course of your interaction with them. You can securely and privately share this information; e.g. the list of customers who have filled out your lead form. We’ll then integrate Google Ads to help you connect with these customers and others like them using solutions such as Customer Match.
We’ve observed how brands using first-party data in their marketing efforts – such as lifecycle marketing, personalisation engines and cross-channel lead management – have more than doubled their revenue uplift. In addition, first-party data helps businesses realise a 1.5x reduction in costs.
Another key element to a successful lead-generation campaign: capturing the lead while the prospect is still in the consideration phase. This is why we stress on the importance of investing in both call ads and lead form extensions. The two ad formats help you connect with potential customers directly from your ad, often while they’re still considering the options available to them.
Lead form extensions help you drive high-quality leads across Discovery, Search, YouTube and Display ads inventory, while also helping you improve performance. When lead forms are added to video ads, marketers can expect to see up to a 14% reduction in cost per lead, compared to leads from their website alone.
To help you further qualify your lead forms, we use conditional fields for asking follow-up questions in your lead form based on previous answers, enabling your sales team to prioritise efforts. For instance, if you’re running a car showroom, through conditional fields, you might first ask a prospect where they’re planning to buy a car, after which you can offer a list of dealerships or showrooms in their area. Based on these answers, you can ensure that only the right sales team reaches out to the customers in that respective area.
As a Blue Badge partner, we often get access to upcoming Beta products on the Google Ads Platform and Performance Max Campaigns are one such feature. After you’ve connected your conversion data and set up all your lead forms, we’ll help you use Performance Max campaigns right alongside your keyword-based Search campaigns to maximise high-quality leads across the internet. Performance Max is an innovative cross-channel lead-gen campaign which uses your goals, creative assets, offline conversions and audiences to optimise your budget across Google channels like Discover, YouTube and more – and we’ll help you make the most of it. It also optimises for additional Search inventory which you may be missing from your main Search campaigns
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When you share the leads which resulted in a sale, along with their conversion value, Performance Max will use our in-house automation solutions to find similarly valuable leads across all Google surfaces or channels. By analysing billions of combinations of signals, Performance Max will help you serve the right creative to the right audience, and only at the right time; and, it uses data-driven attribution to help you optimise your budgets and bids. Relying on a single campaign only, you can provide easier ways for your consumers to submit leads and get in touch with you directly through your ad or your website. Simply create one lead form and Performance Max will tailor the format to match the inventory your ad is being served on in an almost flawless way.
One of our clients in the field of law used Performance Max to increase the volume of new enterprise leads in a very efficient way – they implemented offline conversion import to measure the number of leads which met their custom-defined qualification criteria. Performance Max helped them optimise for qualified leads, which increased lead quality and quantity across multiple channels. Resultantly, our client saw an over 150% increase in enterprise leads at a 54% lower cost per lead.
As you work on your lead-gen strategy, evaluate data from customer interactions, consider sharing leads which led to a sale and how valuable they were, along with your first-party data with Google Ads in a secure and private way. This helps Google’s systems (including campaign types like Performance Max) learn and drive high-quality leads on your behalf.
We understand that your marketing team works hard to generate high-quality leads for your business. In that spirit, we’re committed to constantly using new tools to help you improve lead quality and your return on investment from Google Ads & stand apart from your competitors.
Working with an official Google Partner such as Orca on your campaigns to make use of the latest opportunities in paid search. Get in touch today on 01903 866143
