Most Lead Generation advertisers seek to drive a high volume of valuable conversions. In fact, 70% of lead gen advertisers cite improving lead quality as their most important objective.1 Thanks to Google AI-powered solutions, it’s easier than ever to generate leads that fit your business qualifications, at scale.
Lead Gen Deep Dive: tl;dr Ads News & How Tos series
Determine the actions that matter most to your business and optimize for value
- Map out your lead-to-sale journey. Choose a single event within that journey to bid towards. We recommend optimizing to the lowest funnel conversion, such as the final sale value, whenever possible since this more accurately reflects the true economic value to your business.
- Depending on your business objective, this may be a qualified lead or an action further down the funnel. When deciding which action to optimize towards, consider the following:
- Accuracy: Closely aligns with your desired outcomes and business objectives.
- Volume: Generate at least 15 conversions per month.
- Upload frequency: Can upload data regularly, ideally daily.
- Conversion Delay: The action you want to optimize for occurs within a manageable conversion delay.
- Depending on your business objective, this may be a qualified lead or an action further down the funnel. When deciding which action to optimize towards, consider the following:
- Assign two or more values to your conversion. We recommend dynamic values whenever possible. These values can be uploaded using measurement solutions like the gTag or enhanced conversions for leads.
- For example, an advertiser might create static values for high, medium, and low quality leads, based on qualifying attributes captured in the lead form submission or elsewhere. More advanced advertisers might import dynamic values, representing a prospect’s likelihood to convert, or the actual final sale value.
- Why: Assigning meaningful values will give you a deeper understanding of the true business impact that your marketing efforts are delivering. The better data you provide, the more effectively Google AI-powered solutions can deliver against your goals.
Optimize to the data that matters most with a value based bidding strategy
Smart Bidding enables you to optimize towards your business goals, by maximizing your conversions and business value, and making accurate predictions for each and every auction, factoring in a wide range of signals.
However, not all customers are equally valuable to your business. If you are able to assign values to your customers, use value based bidding, which combines your conversion data with Google’s real-time understanding of user intent to optimize bids to reach the right customer with your ads. There are two value based bidding strategies to consider:
- If you don’t have a specific ROAS target: Use the Maximize conversion value bidding strategy to maximize total conversion value within your specified budget.
- If you have a specific ROAS target: Use the Max Conversion Value bid strategy with a ROAS target to maximize the total conversion value within your efficiency target.
- If you are unable to report values and would prefer to focus on driving conversion volume only, leverage Maximize Conversions bidding with an optional target CPA.
Scale your campaigns beyond Search
Driving leads with Google means that you can reach your customers wherever they are in their purchase journey—from maps, to display, to video, and more. Use AI-powered Search and Performance Max campaigns together to multiply results across all of Google.
- Create a Performance Max campaign to reach customers across Search, Display, Discover, YouTube, and more.
- Why: Performance Max is Google’s first cross-channel lead generation campaign, optimizing your budget across Google properties to find you more high quality leads.
- Add lead form assets and call assets.
- Why: Drive leads at scale by enabling customers to reach out to you in their preferred way, making it easier than ever to collect leads across all channels. Users can submit their information directly within your ad or call you as they search, discover, and watch content.
Tip
To make the most out of your lead form assets, be as informative as possible in your ad text and form descriptions to clearly communicate the value you’re providing users for giving you their information (E.G. “Get a free quote”). Also, provide a call-to-action that best represents how users can follow up with your business (E.G. “Complete this form” or “Call us”).
Qualify leads on your site
It’s important to follow industry best practices and protect your website with safeguards, filtering for high-intent customers before receiving leads.
- Use friction in lead forms, such as ReCaptcha.
- Why: ReCaptcha is a seamless fraud detection service that stops bots and other automated attacks while seamlessly approving valid users.
- Adopt a double-opt in approach to capturing leads.
- Why: When a customer provides you their details (such as email addresses), ensure they confirm these are valid before adding them to your CRM or mailing lists to ensure you’re engaging with high-intent customers.
- Use server-side validation to validate web forms.
Brands winning at lead generation
1. Toyota drives new leads at a lower cost-per-acquisition
- NorCal Toyota wanted to drive incremental and cost effective leads for new car sales. Its goal was to find a fully-automated solution to scale channel coverage and reach more customers across Google, including Search, by capturing demand missed in keyword-based campaigns in addition to using other highly-engaging formats on Google, such as video.
- They experimented with Performance Max to drive qualified conversions for new cars, measuring various actions on its website, including credit applications, chatting with the dealer, click-to-call, requesting a quote, viewing inventory, and visiting the dealership.
Results:- 70% increase in conversions on top of existing Search campaigns
- 94% lower cost-per-acquisitions than Search-only campaigns
2. One Blinc boosts conversions with Performance Max campaigns
- OneBlinc is an American fintech credit provider with the mission to protect the underserved from discriminatory financial practices. After conducting market research to understand financial needs during the pandemic, OneBlinc decided to expand its portfolio offerings beyond emergency loans into checking accounts, salary advances, and other financial products with the marketing goal to find more qualified leads.
- OneBlinc counted on Google Ads to reach and attract new clients. Following some success with Display, OneBlinc tested Performance Max with first-party data and audience lists. This all-encompassing alternative was adopted as a parallel solution to expand across all of OneBlinc’s Google Ad channels and inventory and to use automation to optimize for the best channel mix and acquire new customers.
Results:- 30% increase in conversions when adding Performance Max campaigns to their account
- 45% lower cost-per-acquisitions than Search-only campaigns
1. Convince & Convert 2022 | Stat of the Month with Oracle
