B2B Lead Gen Paid Search campaigns can be some of the most difficult to perfect because unlike eCommerce, where revenue is often generated in the initial session, a B2B lead can take months to become a customer. Because of this, it can take a long time before advertisers have enough data to discover whether they have a lead quality problem.
Here at Concept, B2B Lead Generation is what we do. We understand our client's pain points and have developed a series of strategies that have been proven to improve lead quality. We’ll explore that in this article, but first, let’s examine what factors can make leads poor quality.
Reasons for Poor Lead Quality
Leads can be low or poor quality for a variety of reasons, but most often due to:
- Lower deal quality than is profitable
- Low close rate (often a sales problem)
- Low retention, or low Customer Lifetime Value
Improve Your Lead Quality in Paid Search:
Step One: Refine Your CRM Data to Determine High-Value Leads
In order to understand the quality of your leads, you have to have good CRM data. This includes sales pipeline data as well as detailed information on each contact in your database.
The great news is, with HubSpot's newest release of Breeze, you can automatically enrich your contact records by allowing HubSpot's AI to find information on your contact and edit the properties like annual company revenue, number of employees, employment role (job title), social media links (for companies), and more. Previously, users had to rely on third-party integrations to accomplish this level of automation. Learn more about Breeze here.
From here, do a deep dive to determine the following:
- What services or products, deal types, or deal amounts result in the most profit?
- What do customers in this segment have in common in terms of demographics, company types, job titles, etc.
- What is your Customer Lifetime Value?
- What services, products deal types tend to correlate with a higher CLTV?
- What is your close rate, both from organic and paid leads? How do they differ?
Answering these questions will help you better refine your customer personas to target high-value clients.
Step Two: Refine Audience Insights
Easy Tools Within Google Ads
In Google Ads, you can take this a step further by uploading your CRM audiences as Customer Match lists. Doing this allows you to gain insights into your audience data by going to Audience Manager> Your Data Insights within Google Ads, revealing how your audiences overlap with Google’s demographic and interest audiences.
For example, if your list is large enough, you can see how your list indexes within market audiences like air travel, recreational equipment, what kinds of sports they are likely to enjoy, what kind of news they read, and more. Try this with all of your customers first, and then for high-value customer segments. This information will allow you to build better audience signals in Performance Max and bid higher for these audiences in Search.
Using customer match lists in Google also allows you to use these audiences as exclusions in Search, and to bid only for new customers in Performance Max. This ensures that you are paying for impressions only for people who are likely to be new contacts. Or, you can use customer match lists to re-engage with customers who you would like to upsell or cross-sell into other products using remarketing.
Use LinkedIn Audience Data in Microsoft Ads
Though Microsoft Ads does not have the data insights that Google does, the platform does carry similar in-market and affinity audiences, making it a generally good idea to observe the same audiences in both platforms. Where Microsoft Ads outshines Google is its LinkedIn-derived audience data, which allows users to observe and target audiences based on job title and company industry.
Use Third-Party Tools To Create Look-A-Like Audiences
While Similar To audiences are no longer native to Google Ads, you can still create look-a-like audiences using third-party tools like ZoomInfo, which can integrate with your CRM. Tag your high-value leads in your CRM, then use your preferred data platform to create a look-alike audience. From there, you can observe or bid higher for these audiences in Google and Microsoft.
Step 3: Refine Your Conversion Events
After not doing research into their CLTV and determining what their high value persona deal type and persona is, failing to record this data as conversion events is the biggest mistake advertisers can make. There are so many data points pushed to ad platforms using proper conversion tracking. Here are our top tips for improving your conversion events.
Improve Lead Quality from Phone Calls
Many call tracking platforms like Call Rail now have AI-powered sales qualification for phone calls. This allows advertisers to understand what percentage of their phone calls result in sales and the source of said phone calls. You can even see which keywords are likely to lead to sales, so gone are the days of spending money on low-intent phone calls that waste your sales team’s time.
You can set up custom events in your call tracking system that automatically trigger in your ad platform when a conversation occurs with a sales-qualified lead, using keywords and phrases within the conversation that you set.
Improve Form Fill Lead Quality
Now that you have custom personas for high-value clients and have created lifecycle stage events for them, you can import them into Google Ads as conversions.
Thankfully, there is a native integration for Google Ads within HubSpot that will allow you to push custom conversion events for lifecycle stage updates directly to the ad platform. From there, you’ll need to prioritize these conversion events at the campaign or event level.
In order to do this in Microsoft Ads, you’ll need a custom integration for either HubSpot or Salesforce. There are third-party tools that can help with this, or you can create a custom UTM property that is used in campaign assets that are only sent to high-value leads. This would allow you to trigger a conversion in Microsoft Ads whenever a sales-qualified lead views a page with that UTM parameter. Alternatively, you can import offline conversions to Microsoft Ads using a Google Sheet, as long as you’re capturing MSCLKID data.
What is Value Based Bidding?
Value Based Bidding allows Google to optimize for the conversion events that have the biggest impact on your business's bottom line. This is done by assigning different conversion values for each event, with bottom-of-funnel, high-value events getting the highest value.
Don’t get overwhelmed: The amount of those values matters less than their amount relative to each other. You’re simply telling the ad platform your priorities for what makes a great lead.
You can determine the value of a lead using a standard formula of Average Sale Value x Conversion Rate but that’s not necessary, nor is it always the best way to optimize your campaigns (for example, you may need to set your base lead value very low and your high value conversion value very high in order to get the outcome you want). And the conversion values you set can always be changed later in the Goals sections of Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, or under Value Rules in Google Ads, so don’t stress!
The goal is repeatable progress, not perfection. Remember that it’s almost impossible to get 100% of your leads to be extremely high value. Google’s algorithm will need to cast a wider net, showing your ad to more people that it thinks will be likely to submit a lead and result in a high-value deal or sale.
Re-Calibrate Your Lead Quality with Concept
Could your team use some help improving lead quality? Confused by terms like MQL, SQL, CLTV, and CAC? Concept helps companies across many different industries with B2C and B2B lead generation on both a contract and ongoing basis. Whether you require custom Salesforce or HubSpot solutions, paid media audits and management, or even branding and web development, the crew at Concept has your back. Contact us today.