>> NEHA: Hi! I’m Neha, Vice President for Cross-Media Solutions here at Google.
In my role, I meet with marketers like yourselves on a regular basis to understand your core business needs.
I then work with our Ads product development team to bring together solutions
that help drive more qualified leads and meet your business goals.
The past year has presented us with many challenges, and that’s true for people across the globe,
both personally and professionally. But there’s also been a massive shift.
The pandemic has changed the way we connect with others, including the businesses we interact with.
I’ve experienced this firsthand as my own decision-making process
and purchasing behaviors changed in the last several months.
For example, our deck needed repairs, but I couldn’t find any contractors through friends or neighbors.
We were also hesitant to have multiple vendors visit our house to assess the deck.
So I started looking online and sent our requirements and photos to a few remodeling vendors.
And many were able to provide quotes without coming to our house.
We ended up choosing a reliable contractor who we have now also referred to our friends.
This is just one example of how now, more than ever, it’s important for lead-gen marketers
to connect with their customers online.
In fact, nearly one-third of people surveyed said they’d rather buy from a company or brand
that provides a wide range of ways to connect with them.
So it’s more urgent than ever to drive lead quality without sacrificing lead volume.
This is because nurturing leads often happens offline
such as over the phone, via email, or by meeting with a customer.
Following up with too many low-quality leads can be very costly and time intensive,
and you can’t afford to get bogged down with bad leads.
Also, how do you distinguish the good leads from the poor-quality leads?
We’d like to partner with you to overcome these challenges.
Google Ads can help you generate quality leads online
by connecting your offline customer data back to your campaigns.
This includes leads that resulted in a sale and other first-party data.
That helps us understand the types of customers that bring more value to your business.
Then you can use automation to drive high-quality leads at scale
by reaching similar customers throughout their journey.
Here’s a great example of how it can be done:
Paycor is a platform that provides recruitment, HR, and payroll solutions.
They partnered with their agency, Metric Theory, to drive valuable leads using automation.
They first used offline conversion import to upload their closed leads
and included revenue from deals as the conversion values.
They then implemented a target return on ad spend automated bid strategy,
also known as tROAS, to find more valuable customers.
As a result of these changes, Paycor saw deals increase by 210% and ROAS increase by 26%.
So what can you do to achieve success like Paycor?
My colleague, Kim, is here to tell you more about that.
She’ll talk about the latest innovations in Google Ads
that will help you generate high-quality leads efficiently at scale.
Over to you, Kim!
>> KIM: Thanks so much, Neha!
Hello, everyone! I’m Kim Spalding. I’m a Product Director here at Google Ads.
My team has been working to develop products and features that will help you drive more high-quality leads.
Our focus has been on three main areas: measurement, creative, and automation.
Automated products can drive strong performance,
but you play a critical role and set the foundation for success.
Automation performs best when you close the loop on how the leads performed.
You can do this in a few ways.
First, tell us how these leads performed in your sales funnel using offline conversion import.
Bid strategies like Target CPA and Target ROAS
use that conversion data along with auction time signals to acquire qualified leads.
Including each conversions’ value in your uploads enables maximized conversion value
and Target ROAS bidding to generate leads that may be more valuable to your business.
To make it easier to implement OCI, we’ve introduced offline conversion import helper.
It’s a project management tool that simplifies implementation
by providing detailed guidance, stakeholder management, and milestone tracking.
We’re also building ways to make it easier to import conversions by using only the information
you collected through your lead forms.
This removes the need to make changes to your CRM systems.
Stay tuned for more updates on this later this year.
And to further streamline your work, Zapier has an integration with Google Ads,
which makes it easier for you to import your conversions automatically
from dozens of the most popular CRM platforms.
Second, use first-party data.
This is any data you collect directly from your customers with their consent
in the course of your interactions with them.
You can securely and privately share this information,
such as the list of customers who have filled out a lead form.
Google Ads can then work on your behalf to connect with these customers
and others like them using solutions like Customer Match.
We’ve seen brands that use first-party data in their marketing efforts more than double their revenue uplift.
These efforts include lifecycle marketing, personalization engines, and cross-channel lead management.
We’ve also found that first-party data helps brands realize a one-and-a-half times reduction in costs.
Another key ingredient to a successful lead-gen campaign
is capturing the lead while the prospect is still in the consideration phase.
This is why we’ve invested in both call ads and lead form extensions.
These two ad formats help you connect with potential customers directly from your ad,
often while they’re still weighing their options.
Our new lead form extensions help you drive high-quality leads
across Search, YouTube, Discovery, and Display ads inventory.
They also help improve performance.
When adding lead forms to video ads, advertisers saw as much as a 14% reduction in cost per lead
when compared to leads from their website.
And to help you further qualify your leads, we’re introducing conditional fields.
These let you ask follow-up questions in your lead form based on previous answers.
This can help your sales team prioritize their efforts.
For example, let’s say you manage auto dealerships.
Using conditional fields, you could first ask a potential buyer where they’re looking to buy a car.
Then, you can offer a list of dealerships in their area for them to choose from.
Based on these answers, you can make sure the right sales teams reach out to customers in their area.
Conditional fields will be available in the next few months.
Once you’ve connected your conversion data and set up your lead forms,
you can use Performance Max campaigns alongside your keyword-based Search campaigns
to maximize high-quality leads across Google.
Performance Max is our first-ever cross-channel lead-gen campaign.
Performance Max uses your goals, creative assets, offline conversions,
and audiences to optimize your budget across Google channels.
These channels include YouTube, Discover, and more.
It also optimizes for additional Search inventory that you might be missing from your core Search campaigns.
Here’s how it all works together: when you share the leads that resulted in a sale,
along with their conversion value, Performance Max can then use our automated solutions
to find similarly valuable leads across all of Google’s channels.
By analyzing billions of combinations of signals,
Performance Max serves the right creative to the right audience at the right time
and uses data-driven attribution to help you optimize your budgets and bids.
From a single campaign, you can give consumers easier ways to submit leads
and call you directly from your ad or from your website.
You create just one lead form, and Performance Max will tailor the format
to best match the inventory your ad is being served on.
Neo4j, a graph database technology provider, and their agency, VertoDigital, turned to
Performance Max to increase the volume of net new enterprise leads in an efficient way.
First, they implemented offline conversion import
to measure how many leads met their custom qualification criteria.
Performance Max optimized for qualified leads, increasing lead quality and quantity across channels.
Neo4j saw a 157% increase in enterprise leads
at a 54% lower cost per lead.
The Performance Max beta for lead gen will be expanding to thousands of advertisers starting today.
Lastly, as you work on your lead-gen strategy, evaluate data from your interactions with customers.
Consider sharing leads, which resulted in a sale and how valuable they were,
along with your first-party data with Google Ads in a secure and private way.
This helps our systems, including campaign types like Performance Max,
learn and drive high-quality leads on your behalf.
We recognize how hard each of you are working to generate high-quality leads for your business.
And we are committed to building tools to help you improve lead quality
and your return on investment from Google Ads.
On behalf of Neha and I, I want to say thank you very much for watching.
And I hope you enjoy the rest of Google Marketing Livestream!