PPC Case Study
B2B SaaS Company Shows Record Growth With Lead Quality Improvements
Agora
Industry: SaaS
Location: Santa Clara, CA
Bio: Agora is a real-time communications platform that produces SDKs for developers to embed live video, chat and more into their applications.
The Challenge
The client approached us with a challenge every business that works within paid media sees at one point or another – we’re generating leads, but are they helping our bottom line revenue? We were tasked with diving into lead quality and optimizing for sales qualified leads (SQLs).
Our Approach
First, we needed to help the client setup tracking from Google Ads to their back-end systems to understand which campaigns and keywords were generating SQLs. From there, we had what we needed to begin optimizing their budgets to get the most bang for their buck (or SQLs for their budget).
The Solution
Budget Optimization: we analyzed the campaigns that were providing the lowest cost per SQL and optimized the budgets accordingly.
Bid Analysis by Keyword, Device & Location: Similar to the campaign level above, we analyzed down to the keyword in order to improve overall SQL volume while improving cost-effectiveness.
Search Query Analysis: ongoing search query analysis allowed us to understand which queries we needed to remove as negative and which we needed to improve visibility for because they were cost-effective.
Multi-Network Approach: we didn’t leave it up to search ads to get the job done — we also utilized targeted audiences and added Display & Video ads to the mix to increase visibility
The Results
SQL tracking was finally fully set up and ready to go in Q4 2019. With the data we had from Q4, we forecasted a fair yearly goal in 2020 of 1,500 SQLs from Google Ads. At the time, that seemed reasonable, but we didn’t fully take into account our optimizations taking flight and resulting in a quarter over quarter 71% increase in SQLs and 57% decrease in cost per SQL. Because of this, as of April, we are already 76% to goal for the entire year. Now we need to readjust the goal because our results were that incredible.
Another reason for this increase in performance was a significant lead quality increase. In Q4 2019, we saw a lead to SQL ratio of 38.9%, which we were fairly happy with. However, with all of the tactics implemented above as well as cutting out spend that didn’t result in SQLs, we were able to increase this to 63.7% in April 2020, representing a 64% increase in lead quality rate.
