Hey everyone, we really appreciate you coming on and joining us for this conversation today. This is our second kind of 2025 wrap up where we're bringing in some of our experts from refine labs together to just talk some of the key topics that we're seeing in conversations with our clients, conversations on LinkedIn. We really are kind of creating this authentic organic space where we want people to ask questions, bring their questions, what are their challenges and their current roles, what are some of the chatter they're hearing. So very conversational.
Today we're going to talk a lot about paid search and thinking about Google efficiencies and really paid search in its kind of worst case scenario where clients come to us and they're overspending. They're adding too much of their budget to this demand capture mechanism. So we want to go in and dig in with just questions to kind of Q&A with the audience, what they're seeing, what they're feeling. For those who don't know, my name is Evan, I'm marketing at Refine Labs and I'm really excited to kind of bring Megan, our CEO and really the champion of Refine Labs to the table here in my cohost.
And then we also have a great panel with Ryan and Melanne. So kind of with that, I think we should dive in. Let's do this. Good to see everyone.
Thank you for joining. So glad we have it, Melanne and Ryan here are paid media experts and especially have a ton of experience and strong perspectives on people's search. To kind of build on what Evan was mentioning, there really are a few key themes that I hear over and over again when I'm talking with sales leaders, CEOs, even CFOs at different companies that we're either working with or that we might be working with. And I want to kind of break those down because I think it's pretty typical and I would imagine a lot of you listening right now, probably see the same thing at your companies as well.
So one key theme is the majority of companies out there are still typically allocating the majority of their budget to paid search as the primary channel for paid advertising. And I think the reasons are fairly straightforward. It's a very easy channel in terms of attribution to be able to see what return you're getting on your advertising. Sometimes that can actually be a little bit misleading and make it seem like the channel is even more impactful than other channels could be as well.
So that's one common theme. Another and I like to say this, Google has built a very successful business because they make it very easy to spend money. And so it's a complex channel to manage effectively and unfortunately it's easy to waste money. And so there's a lot of people that have an instinct like I think we're probably spending too much, but I don't know where to pull back my spend.
I don't know what campaigns are the highest performing, which ones are really totally unnecessary and I should be saving or reallocating those funds. And then lastly, I think because of this sort of preponderance of just allocating the majority of the budget to search, there isn't any budget or there's not enough budget for demand creation programs on other channels, typically paid social. And so because of that, they're beginning to see growth stall. Demand capture, which is typically what paid search is going to be focused on, is really short and medium term focused.
You're really going after the percentage of your market that's actively looking for something that you're trying to buy and you're ignoring the majority of the market that isn't in active buying mode, but will be soon. And so you're just totally ignoring a percentage of your market that you need to be spending dollars to build brand awareness, problem awareness, your brand, your product, your solution, et cetera. And so a lot of companies really are under investing and aren't looking at their paid advertising strategy holistically enough. So I think what we want to do today is we want to start to break down some of these themes that we're seeing in terms of our perspective on what we see contributes to the majority of budget waste, how to think about driving efficiency on search, how to think about allocating your total budget appropriately between search and social and a bunch of other topics as well.
But to set the stage, I think that's what I'm seeing. I think a lot of companies struggle with this and the hope is throughout this conversation, you'll have some really good tactical takeaways on going back to your paid advertising strategy and really figuring out how you can make adjustments to improve ROI, drive efficiency, and make sure that you're balancing demand capture and demand creation effectively. And that's good into it. Yeah.
Yeah. I think you said it best when there's an inefficient use of dollar, especially in search. And as we look at Q4, it's typically the pattern where we start to see our clients invest a lot more in paid search to try to close the gap in their revenue targets, to try to close the lead gap. And often that inefficiency creates long-term impact than Q1, Q2, and later on.
So I'd love to just Ryan will kind of hear your perspective too for the clients you work with and your experiences where you typically see in budget wasted and paid search most. And I know it's a broad question, but maybe we could start at the high level and we can try to dig back into that. You know, this is going to be a little bit of a broken record here, but where you see the waste is in the CRM, right? It's in the tracking.
And Evan, I think you posted recently, Melin Salesforce to Google Ads integration and tracking is coming up. That's going to be a very, very important piece of content for people to read. Oftentimes you see the waste because the tracking is incorrect. And so you look at Google Ads and a blended view.
And so you're getting cost per demo is at $500. You think you can push on it more. You start spending more, but you don't realize that your branded campaign is lowering that cost per demo drastically. And those are people who are already educated about you.
If you're unable to see the branded versus non-branded perspective in your CRM, that's really going to lead to a lot of waste because you're thinking of being able to use a like a gumball machine and just keep being the quarters and keep getting gumballed out. When in reality, your benefit from branding, your brand has a ceiling to it. So that's often where I see it. Now, I was just going to build on that, Ryan.
I think the key point that you mentioned is making sure that you have conversion tracking set up properly with your CRM such as Salesforce. And it's not good enough to only look at in-platform metrics on how Google Ads are performing. You need to understand how those campaigns are actually driving in-bounds and how those in-bounds are converting across the funnel. And that's going to give you the visibility into what is driving waste.
And search in particular if you set up tracking properly, it's actually relatively straightforward to measure a lot of this pretty accurately. There are some challenges on the paid social side in terms of measuring that granularly. But a lot of people sort of skip over some of those steps. I'd actually love for you to speak a little bit more to that, Ryan, on how you think about setting up conversion tracking properly both in-platform and through the CRM so that people understand what they need to do so that they can get those insights.
Yeah, no, 100% tracking. Like you mentioned, once it's set up, then you're able to see a fairly accurate picture. Usually once it's set up, you have about 80%, 90% correct. There's times where UTM's will drop and there'll be a little bit of fludging here and there.
But once you have it set up, it's pretty locked in. Generally speaking, I'll give you a brief overview. I'm going to go through Salesforce integration in the future. But use the tracking template.
Making sure that your campaign name is being pushed through. Campaign, ad group, and keyboard are the three things that you're going to want to pass into Salesforce. And by doing that, you're going to be able to measure down funnel metrics. Oftentimes, what I see with clients is you get the demo and maybe you get the opportunity to.
But when you start coming down funnel, stage one, stage two, stage three, you quickly see how much of that is just weeded out. Melinda, you see the same thing when you look at clients? Absolutely. I think tracking is number one, the most important aspect around this conversation, right?
How do we assess performance? How do we allocate funds on what's working and what's not? Make someone's working what's not? I think you need to have that tracking in place and make sure it's foolproof.
And that's where deeper bottom of funnel conversion actions come into play. For sure, I think getting your Salesforce integrated, any additional offline conversion imports you can bring into Google Ads account will just help feed a lot better data to work off of. And this is where it really will come into play. The integration with Google Ads and your offline conversions.
Because once the data is flowing into Google, that's where you can actually see metrics per campaign based on those conversion actions and make more tactical optimizations off of it. And kind of taking a step back into answer Evan's question around where we typically see wasted spend on paid search. Tracking aside, I think tactically, and this falls onto what Megan was just mentioning, around how we should treat paid search as a short to medium range demand capture strategy. I think a lot of B2B, SAS marketing teams understand that.
But when they actually deployed paid search, they treat it and they deploy more long term strategies. And what I mean by this is that they actually unintentionally launch demand generation campaigns on paid search instead of demand capture. So what does this actually look like, right? The demand generation on paid search is targeting keywords loosely, not associating a modifier to them, right?
So for example, let's say you're in accounting and you sell accounting software. You loosely target this term by saying accounting software, but there's not really a lot of intention behind that keyword. So what you end up doing is just showing up broadly for anyone searching anything to do with accounting software. These could be people who are just having maybe a question about a certain software.
It could be basically non-purchase driven behaviors. And so you're doing some sort of brand awareness there instead of actually trying to capture demand of people trying to buy a tool. So I think a lot of companies that we see come in, they have some non-branded keywords. They try to attach some intent modifiers like software and such.
But that still isn't that next level of trying to capture demand. It's still at the very top of funnel level that's more so geared towards demand generation and a long term strategy than a short term demand catcher. Yeah, I think search is such great points there, both on intent on tracking search and other people becomes a get happy fast channel because it's a direct response. It's a last touch attribution.
It's the ability to influence it quickly, to satisfy the need from typically a senior level executive who's wanting to get more volume. I think there's two key, making sure that your UTM's are mapping to your contact object within CRM within Salesforce and have that map all the way through to opportunity is absolutely key for you to not only track just like initial value of that keyword and that targeting criteria, but also to see the influence on qualified pipelines. So I would just take it a step further there and make sure that typically we see it stop right at the contact level, but we don't see that move any further down the funnel. So it's harder for us to assess performance and success there.
I also think there's been a shift to in how Google is the world of B2B marketing on Google is so different now than it used to be. Eliminating broad match modifiers really helped B2B for a while because you could open up an aperture to keywords that maybe were relative but still kind of put some constraints on it. In my opinion, I think B2B or Google's pivoting back to a B2C where it's direct response or e-commerce motion because that's where their money's made. So it's making it challenging for all of us when we think about how do we effectively put our dollars there.
So I'd love to, like when if you go a little bit deeper, you talk about this demand creation and demand capture element. Typically when clients come to us, I'd say they're spending $30,000 a month and we can almost often eliminate 25 or 30% of that wasted spend because they're in this creation bucket. But it's not a bit more how to structure an account or some of the structure you see that are ineffective and inefficient that people can kind of go back and audit their accounts and think maybe a bit differently on it. Yeah, 100%.
I think there's a mistake a lot of teams make is that they think that there's no ceiling on page search. I think sometimes you have to just understand that in your industry there will be a ceiling to actual intent-driven searches and you should try to maximize towards them. What ends up happening is that people think there's an unlimited ceiling. They want to scale, scale, scale on page search just because they see some winning metrics, right?
That they unintentionally start broadening their keyword targeting going beyond what they really should be going after and end up wasting money and inflating those CPAs. So tactically, I think it comes down to understanding what has worked for your business in the past. What has been those drivers? You can speak directly to your customers.
You could also just look in your analytics software, right? Organically, through SEO, what's driving people to buy from you? And from your social efforts, what type of topics are hitting home with your audience and seem to be driving conversation and driving inbound leads? From there, you can really tailor your paid search strategy and your keyword strategy.
You could remove keywords that you might have thought. What it worked out, but the data actually shows that it's not really certain. Certain topics may not be hitting home with your audience. Let's not target those keywords.
Let's focus on a short list of intent-driven non-branded terms. Let's focus on branded terms. And even competitor terms could be a viable solution for teams if they make the step to make sure that the competitor term is associated with an intent-driven search. So don't just broadly target your competitor's name.
Target keywords such as your competitor's name and somebody searching for an alternative to them or the pricing for that tool. You could use these kind of terms to really tailor your ad copy on paid search to really target them. But typically, I see the most winning type of strategies around paid search where this less wasted spend is around structured non-branded campaign that's really focused on working terms from other data sources I mentioned, as well as your branded terms, of course. Your brand name is going to be the primary driver of conversions for you just because people want to search for your brand.
They're looking just for you. And then I've also actually seen competitor terms starting to win again for my clients. So that would be a third campaign type that I would recommend. Ryan, a competitor always comes up in all of our conversations.
I want to start bidding on competitor terms. I have to bid on competitors. They're doing it. I need to do it.
And then often it's a bit of a shit show when campaigns are actually deployed and there's no targeting capabilities. Maybe a real world example, Ryan, where you've seen somebody potentially bidding on competitors where you've made an auditor suggested that and or where you maybe launched new. I think that's helpful for two different perspectives on how people can evaluate theirs. Yeah.
Competitors. This seems to come up very often. There's good reason to go after competitors. People searching for competitors are solution aware.
They often have a type of intent to them. I have a lot of competitors that I won't get into it. I have launched NetNew and I've also adjusted competitor campaigns. When people come up to me in the streets and ask me if they should launch a Google asset competitor campaign, of course, I ask them who they are, how they know me, how they know my work.
And then I say it's about a 50-50 chance. I think we'll have a really good point about it. Here's a differentiator in your ad copy. I think that's really key.
If you have a differentiator that your competitor does not have, you have to use it. Because that is something that might be as someone's consideration set. What can those differentiators be? We all know price is the big one.
Right? We have the best data for a cheaper price. Okay. That's going to be people's interest.
It's going to do it. It could be things like integrations. It could be things like enterprise size. You work with a particular type of company.
You can go international. You are SOC2 compliant. Maybe it is something like reviews. You just want it to work.
You have higher review on 4.8 stars versus 3.7. All those little things can get someone to go, wait a second, hold on a second. This person might be a better choice for me. So the big ways that people miss competitors is a couple of ways.
If you work in the industry where brands have a lot of brand traffic, so let's just say it's a platform people log into it and they have hundreds of thousands of users. If you just bid on that brand name, you're going to get swamped with a bunch of people who are just logging in. So you have to be sure to get yourself out of those options. The better options to be in are things like alternatives, reviews, pricing is a good one.
You're going to want to stay away from a lot of the negative keywords that you use for your brand such as address and contact information and crunch space. Those are really good ones to use for your competitor as well. They'll get you out of some perfect options. I have seen them convert.
I haven't seen them really be a super strong driver conversions. Again, it's a 50-50 shot. I've seen it work with high ECB and low ECB, but there's just never been a try to true. Yes, I'm going to tell you 100% this is going to work for you.
I think it is something if you want to test or get out from your non-brand. I know I mentioned this about how people like to expand. People like to expand what they'll do is toss more keywords in. Cool.
This is working a little bit. Give me more keywords. Give me more keywords. Here's competitors.
You're actually going to want to break that off and put a firewall there and make sure you're targeting competitors specifically and not just adding it to everything else. I think coming back to the idea of demand capture versus demand creation, I actually do think competitor could be one of the most effective demand creation strategies you could deploy on paid search because instead of trying to just grab that click, I think it's really effective when people are looking for an alternative for their solution aware and they're looking for a platform that's an alternative. I think there is value in showing up. Even if they don't click through book a demo of contacts, they'll right away.
I think the fact that you can get your brand name just in their head and then when they go onto other platforms and go about their day, they will remember your name more than if you were to never show up. I think it could be as more of an effective demand generation strategy as opposed to our typical capture place. That's a super interesting thought because I was just talking to someone earlier this week who is actually getting quality conversions from gated content on paid search, which is a pretty rare thing. I was just thinking while you're talking, I'm like, oh, if you had a Forrester report said you were the leader in this category, you were running that on top of a competitor, that might be kind of that demand chain play.
That's really interesting. I think that what I hear here, what the risk associated with this right is we think about efficiency for going into Q1 is going to be that there's going to be a chance that budget continues to increase for this campaign because you have a brand bidding on that their core term. In fact, it leads to driving up your CPC. It's worth just keeping an eye on that.
I think going to kind of evaluated competitor campaigns, understood tracking as an important component to understanding where your metrics and performance are going. I think it's going to be helpful too to get kind of in the weeds a little bit if a new client comes to you and we need to audit their paid search account and we are wanting to set them up for success in Q1 at 2025. Walk us through like the, maybe each of you take two to three things that you would zero in on and what would you look for? What would you consider changing?
Obviously, you can use a real-time example here, but I think that'll help us understand tactically, where do I go into my account and how do I start digging in? I don't know. I think it's a little bit of a problem. I think there's a technical scenario I usually see when I onboard a client and I open up their paid search account.
That's what I mentioned earlier on the call. It's just unintentional demand generation. What I'll see is they might have some good structure in their account. They have branded separate different non-branded.
They have a competitor campaign that's split up from the non-branded group. They might have a structure in place, but when you click into the ad groups, oftentimes I'll see just one generic non-branded campaign that houses 15 different ad groups of 15 different topics, 15 different groups of keywords that really have much varying different volumes of searches. I'm going to do two to three of the 15 ad groups that drive the majority of volume in that campaign and therefore suck all the spend towards them and limiting the amount of money that gets spread out and disfers to the other remaining ad groups. I typically see just lumping and dumping on the non-brand side.
Additionally, I see people, companies utilizing Broadmash fairly in an incorrect way. They'll use Broadmash keywords with very little intent modifiers to the keywords. They might not use alternative or solution or software or typical intent modifiers. What this really does is just drive a lot of very low intent topofunnel type of searches.
Those low intent topofunnel searches are good for demand generation. I think there's some value in showing up for this type of topic you might be targeting, but if you really want to lean in on demand capture, unfortunately this keyword match type does not bear well. I see a lot of companies just having a bunch of keywords stuck into one campaign with Broadmash attracting a lot of impressions and traffic from very topofunnel or irrelevant searches. That's really where I see a lot of mistakes.
The solution to that I would say is to switch to a more controlled approach where you can control the type of searches trading in your ads. This is where exact match comes into play. Then I do suggest, instead of having 15 ad groups living under one campaign, actually take the time and I was a little bit more cumbersome and take more time. Splitting that campaign out into maybe 15 non-branded campaigns.
You can really control the cost that you can have per campaign and then that allows you to see winning campaigns, ones that have positive ROI. That's where you can add more money to try to scale that campaign and maybe lower spend on non-performing campaigns or shut them off altogether. Curious what Ryan thinks. Man, I think you nailed it, Melin.
I see the same thing across many accounts. I think it's just added in. It's added in maybe just one ad group and multiple. I think what we always have to keep in mind is Google is going to spend with the volume is, but the conversions are not always worth the volume is.
You have to stop Google from spending. You have to control it like you said, Melin. When I work with clients, sometimes what I do is I'll see what categories are in. I like G2 or Capdero.
Like what categories? Because they've fallen into multiple. They could be part, employee. They could be part HR.
They could be part legal. They could be all parts of these categories. You have to break them up to find out which one of those buckets is going to perform best, which one's actually matching intent of your site that when they get there, they convert at a higher rate and they become opportunities and high quality opportunities. Google is going to keep expanding, keep expanding, keep expanding.
That could be useful once you found your winning themes and your winning terms. Then you can do what Melin mentioned earlier. You can start testing outside the box. But until that happens, you really need to put some guardrails up and really need to find out what terms your searches use to convert into quality leads and knobs.
There's a subcategory element there that I see all the time where companies just bid broadly on brand and generic things and don't recognize what the revenue contribution is to the bigger business that potentially is a subcategory or niche industry within their broader brand. So I'd encourage folks to is like, this is where there's a lot of transparency with the sales team, the leadership team is understanding, okay, here's our two quarters of revenue. What are the industries within this that are driving the highest contribution to success for our business? Within that is where you can start thinking about your search strategy too because you already know there's a bit of a win there.
If you're thinking about from a capture mechanism, you can start to niche in on that, shave off some of your budget from the more broadly non-brand terms into a more of a niche. So say it's healthcare specifics. I think that helps you understand how to move the needle a little bit, but also it recognizes that typically when we open these large accounts and we are auditing them, we are seeing that there's just years and years of keywords being added and we're wondering why performance is declining, why we're continuing to chase our things. We have to recognize that in any industry or in any part of the world, trends change.
So so do search terms, so do conversations, so do industries. So what once worked, you know, last quarter and was your highest driver in conversions? If you're starting to see that chip away and inefficiencies come there, it's time to kind of zoom out. Don't chase it with more budget.
That's going to be Google's always like, add more budget, add more budget. In my opinion, I think if you have a search impression share lost a budget that's like less than 5%, you're paying a premium for your keywords and your waste unit. So I think that there's just a couple of ways to evaluate big accounts as niche down to market segments or potential industry segment and then also be a relative, or understand that trends evolve and so performance is going to naturally progress there. Megan, I'd love for your just to kind of understand the conversations you have with some of these sales leaders coming in.
Again, they talk about search and some of the challenges they see with the business because they want a high volume of leads because they're searching as busy. How do you kind of help us coach or help set expectations, right? That a lot of times we're going to typically shave that budget or reallocate to become more efficient. Yeah, I think it's a great question.
And Melin and Ryan have touched on some of these points so far throughout the conversation. So I'll kind of reinforce sort of usually my key recommendations and how I explain how our team is going to come in and help address this. And so one is trying to communicate the point. And I think Melin, you brought this up that typically there is a ceiling of how high your budget should be go for paid search.
You're going to begin to see diminishing returns if you go beyond that particular ceiling. And the right strategy for search is what is the right amount for me to spend to drive a strong ROI and to get high quality conversions? And then how do I reallocate the rest of my paid advertising budget to other channels to drive other medium and long term demand creation strategies? So that's one key takeaway.
And beginning to set the expectation and get people to feel comfortable that they actually can probably spend less and drive the same or better results on search. And we need to get under the covers and actually figure out how we're going to do that for that particular company. But in many ways, we're able to do that for almost every customer that comes in. The second is beginning to open their mind and realize that they're typically not investing or under investing in demand creation.
And that that has a very different approach, strategy, mindset, measurement and time sort of timed ROI than demand capture. It's not the same thing. And so beginning to set the stage that if you are going to make a commitment, allocate some budget to paid social, take the right approach and execute on that strategy that meets B2B buyers where they're at today, avoiding gated content, avoiding direct response, focusing more on problem awareness, brand awareness, solution awareness, giving people rich, valuable content, bringing them back to your website to learn more and engage, not necessarily immediately convert that they will see the benefits of that strategy. But it will take a few more quarters than what they're typically used to seeing from a page search perspective.
So it's getting them comfortable with the idea that right now, really efficiency on search and finding that right budget that is just enough without hitting diminishing returns and then standing up an appropriate demand creation strategy, that is really how you should be thinking about deploying your paid advertising budget. And so those are the core concepts that ultimately I want to make sure that any customer we work with is philosophically aligned to because that's a strategy that we're going to execute when we start working together. And it's not that there are no quick wins, right? We're often able to improve Google search performance and efficiency while also setting the company up for success for future quarters as well.
And I think the best companies are able to understand the importance of both of those and invest budget accordingly. Awesome. It's common when we have these, I feel like at times, right? It feels almost like, and I'm sure everybody here that's managing paid search.
It feels like you're kind of having those conversations consistently, quarter after quarter, month after month. And I think that the hard part is that the idea of experimentation too, right? So there's one thing like I need the volume here, but then we have to get in the weeds and we think about actually practitioners and doing the work. It's so I want to talk a little bit too about experimenting within paid search, right?
There's a lot, there's bid strategies, there's a kind of keyword strategies, performance max, conversion goals. I would love to hear each, maybe one or two experiments that you have found successful in the short term for one of your clients and maybe something where you failed too. Where did we learn something? And I think that that's helpful to open that up a little bit.
Ryan, you can go ahead and kick us out there. Yeah. So, I think just building up what Megan said and kind of where we are, if you're doing an experiment, your ROAS from the channel is going to go down and you're going to have to level set with that, right? Okay, we're going to, you're going to test another 5,000.
We have to kind of loosen the brains on this ROAS expectation because we are stretching, we are learning, we are optimizing, it's going to take time if it ever pans out. Some of the experiments that I've been running recently have been around, I've been doing kind of two things. One is using, I work with a client that has a more of a PLG motion. So, I've been experimenting with maximize conversion value and this particular client pushes their stages back into Google ads.
So, kind of up sign up to the whole registration process. And our experiment now is adjusting the values so that we reward Google, we tell Google to reward itself differently, right? I explain it like this. I go, a Google's that like coworker who will take the shortest path to get to that goal that they have to do.
It will cut every corner to get to that thing. If you reward them properly though, it might be able to get you more what you want. So, just signing up, you know, there's a lot of people who sign up for things in the drop-off. Can you change the reward system so that you'll, okay, that person is actually worth the $0.
But this person who actually goes through the whole process, they're worth $50. And the person who actually uses this platform, they're like a thousand bucks. Even if you use the placeholder values, if you have a high volume, that is something that we can absolutely test out to see if we can change how Google, again, tries to find value for you. So, you know, you can take the shortest path, but when you get to high-value numbers, it might be easier for Google to find you those high values instead of finding you those hundreds of low values.
So, that's one experiment that I'm running right now. I'm hopeful that it works out. It's still kind of in the pending stages now. Yeah, and I've actually used the conversion value bid strategy for some of my clients too.
And I'm seeing good success with it. So, yeah, giving Google that data to definitely prioritize the higher value conversions. I am seeing a pay off and I really hope to see it pay off for you as well in your accounts. A cool experiment that I've been running recently, and it just ties back to kind of frying the demand generation on Google, right, on paid search.
I mentioned how competitor campaign could be an aspect to do more demand generation than trying to capture demand. A unique strategy I've been exploring. And I don't track my experiments and against KPIs and goals that I would track against our bread and butter campaigns or like branded, winning campaigns. Experiments I typically do, I leave it kind of loosely open.
Like I'm just trying to see data basically, right, identify trends. One particular experiment I've been doing is re-targeting my website traffic with dynamic search ads. Dynamic search is a campaign where you're not telling Google, hey, these are the keywords I want to target and this is an ad copy I want you to show. Instead, what it's doing is taking your landing pages on your website and you can specify which landing page you want it or you can specify, hey, just use my entire website.
And basically what it does is it anytime as a person searches for a term, a keyword, whether it's top of funnel, bottom of funnel, middle of funnel related to that landing page, it will trigger your app to show and your app will be dynamically created by Google with relevant content from that page. But the step I'm taking is layering our website traffic. So these are warm audiences who have been to our site who have not converted. I want to see what other terms are they searching for.
It's kind of like a research collection campaign type where I can see, all right, they're coming into our site, resell accounting software, let's say, what other terms are they looking for, what topics are they interested in and how can we get in front of that, right? And so from a demand generation and demand creation perspective, I think it's valuable to follow your audience where they have questions and thoughts about your software or what your products all for. I think there's value in showing up and having a brand name show up at the top of Google search when they do look for answers to questions. And dynamic search ads has been doing well.
I will say it's not capturing demand because the landing pages that we are targeting aren't demo request type of film pages. There could be blog pages that are targeted there, right? This is kind of like an additional way to see additional keywords to target in your primary non-branding campaign. That was awesome.
That was worth the price right there, honestly. I will tell you, there isn't conversion data, bottom of funnel, mqls coming from this type of campaign. But what it is showing me is that there's other keywords we could be targeting in our non-brand to build on top of our existing winning non-brand terms. I would love to keep the team posted on how that campaign is going.
It is a recent launch that I launched earlier in October. But yeah, that's awesome. Oh, I was going to mention one more thing that I had to focus on recently for clients is ad copy. A lot of times for ad copy, a lot of people have different strategies for ad copy.
I've seen some good ones out there. We find our philosophy is to always have the brand name in because it's free and precious if they don't click. But then after that party gets like the lose how you match intent, I've really been focused on pinning the first and second headlines and really playing with this dynamic of calling out a differentiator or a value prop and then ending with a tagline for refined labs. They call out the second inflating CPA, refill apps and that gen.
It's just like you just pick someone's interest and you introduce yourself. I've been using that a lot with some clients and that's been, that's had some really interesting effects and conversion rates. So that's something I would recommend for people. It's just kind of great for you of the 15 headlines that you just kind of toss in there to kind of build space.
The synonyms, everything that you do, the download the guide just creates a little bit like kind of like a one too because the one too always shows the third headline shows kind of whatever Google decides. So I wouldn't put anything there but testing the headlines that you use would be a good idea. How do you balance quality scores and Google's ad strength scores with the pinned headlines? I definitely agree with you there's value in pinning headlines getting a brand that free impression if they don't click.
But at the same time you sometimes get hit with these low scores on Google, hey, unpin these headlines to give your ad strength a 10 out of 10 which then translates to potentially better ranking, right? Google will help you have a better quality score. So how do you manage to balance the two? I think of it like if I can say something with emphasis and it's true and it's a differentiator, I'll always link to that because these are human searching and they're, you know, I'm able to, you know, especially for competitor campaigns, right?
If you are the better price, you absolutely want everyone to know that who is searching competitor. If the differentiation between prices is a little bit looser, if it's like, uh, this is really like, you know, uh, this is a honey crisp apple versus a big lady apple. Like there's not a huge difference. Sorry, Apple nerds out there.
It's like, there's just not a huge differentiator there. Like you might be better off just unpinning and just letting Google figure it out. But any place you have a really strong differentiation, I would always pin. That's, that's kind of my philosophy on it.
I'd love to know if you have different thoughts. No, I agree. I think sometimes you just have to bite the bullet, take the lower quality score, pay the extra, you know, the higher bid and just really have that core message you really want in that pin spot. But then yeah, in other cases where that's less required, I do think just kind of abiding by what Google suggests, right?
Unpinning having 15 headlines with the keywords in there. I think that works too. I think Jambra has a question here. Hello guys.
Sorry, I got here a bit late, but it's a great topic and it's something that I have been thinking about later because it feels like we might be over-ossessing with it. It could be scores because when we think about Google, it is fundamentally B2C platform. And okay, if you are saying KV2C product unit A15 RSA, you cannot pin anything because you need to be showing the best most relevant content. But like when we talk B2C, we don't even need 15 RSA's.
We don't even need four descriptions. All we need like a couple of headlines and over-ossessing on it could score. Okay, we cannot pin anything. We cannot actually create the HV1.
But again, if we are saying B2C SaaS product, we need to be able to show the best things, like especially like we are like of Cognizant. We can go with the C for a second. And I think that's the best thing. I think we need to be able to make sure.
I feel the same way. It seems like if you do, if you don't, right? Yeah, I feel that way a lot of the times. Because you end up being redundant and you see the previews and you're like, I wouldn't click on this.
Like what? So yeah, I might with you on that one. But I will say however, like on the opposite end of the spectrum, for teams who might be dealing with very small budgets on paid search, I think to maximize that budget, you really need to have lower cost for clicks on your keywords. How do you do that?
You have really good quality scores. And so you kind of do have to follow Google's instructions there to really become more efficient with your span, right? Unpinning headlines, you know, having the keyword mentioned in your ad copy more, like improving the landing page, these are all things you could take to really maximize your budget by reducing your bids and CPC for yourself. But if you're not constrained by budget, you could afford a higher cost per click.
But yeah, definitely have ad copy that doesn't fit Google's what they want you to say and speaks more to a human and might score less but might actually drive you a higher click through rate. These are kind of conversations that I love being a part of too because I learned so much from all the different ideas and some exciting experiments in motion. I want to open it up to questions here in a minute just to make sure anybody else that has any kind of comments or wants to come in. But I'm going to, this is a bit of an unplanned question.
So I'm going to go to both of our grime and Melanne. But I'm curious now, like in your opinion with the evolution, Melanne, you're talking about dynamic, like dynamically pulling ads based on landing pages. And so content becomes so important, right? We think about clarity of our message to market.
That's where I'm betting all my bets for Q1 for refined labs. But as we think about paid search specifically, where do you see that? Like your opinion of what do you see changing between now and eight, let's just say six months from now to next year in search. And no wrong answers here.
I'm just always curious because I feel like it's evolved so quickly in the last six months. But I think there's some element of just the search engine results page changing, right? Like now that they're AI is a lot more accepted, I think, I think certain regions, I haven't personally seen this. But like when you search for something on Google search, I'm sure there's now going to be AI prompts below that, right?
So the format of a surf result is changing. Like I expect Google to constantly change this. They might have like images roll up now. They might have other ad formats special.
I don't, I just think that the look on search is going to look, it's just going to look, I feel a lot different. There might be other ad platforms that you want to experiment with. And I think the Man Gen campaign's performance max campaigns, these have been traditionally meant for B2C brands, right? I think there's going to be more adoption for B2B brands going forward in the next six months or so.
This question, it's interesting. It was interesting that when Bing rolled out the AI search results, there was a number of myself included who saw like impressions just get absolutely, just go away basically. And so I've been using the Google AI for a while now. I find it very helpful.
I think there's kind of a few things to think about. One, a couple months ago Google changed how it defined the top of page so that it included the count to the right. It was one of those emails I sent out, like you know, you read them when you have time, maybe I sent them out. But they included this kind of top right column and it was clearly to make room for this AI generator content.
The reason why I think, I don't know if it's going to change a ton and here's what I think. The most expensive clicks are these high intent non-brand clicks. I mean, they're like $20 to $80. It's insanely expensive.
Google does not want to turn that off necessarily, right? If they start putting in a lot of AI, they start pulling in Reddit results and pulling in all kinds of, maybe they make a partnership with G2 and start pulling in those results. What's going to happen to their CBC, right? So I'm a little bit curious to see how Google plays this.
I'm not sure what the benefit drawback is going to be. I know they want to keep the money and I know that they want to keep CBCs high. They want people to spend more. I'm really curious on how it's going to play out.
I feel like as of right now, I feel like it's probably not going to change too much in six months, but I can see maybe in two years we'll see this gradual, that 5% gradualness turn into 25% in a few years. That's pure conjecture. Happy to be wrong. Also happy to be right, more happy to be right.
But yeah, open to any other people's thoughts on this. Yeah, if anybody has any questions or comments, feel free to just come on. But I think it's an interesting question, Megan. I won't ask you, don't worry.
I'm not sure. And one observation and just listening to Melin and Ryan talk through today, I think it's an important takeaway, I think, especially for heads of marketing, CEOs, even CROs, we think about Google is actually a very complex platform. There is not one playbook that is going to work for every company. It requires that you deeply understand the business that you're in, the customer, the product.
There's so many different ways to execute a Google ad strategy. And there are so many ways to spend money inefficiently, right? And a lot of it does require expertise and experience in applying that, but also having an open mind, experimentation, being willing to test, monitoring what is working and not working and making ongoing adjustments. And so, a lot of people will bring this up, like, oh, well, once you optimize Google, you know, and you're onboarding phase, then are we good to go?
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is an ongoing process that we're going to be taking together. And it requires ongoing monitoring and optimization, opportunity to drive experiments and tests. But if you're not an expert and in it as often as we are, it's hard to just sort of gloss over a lot of those complexities. And I think because of that, that's why so many companies find themselves in a position where they're not spending, they're not managing that channel the way that they should.
And they need to really find expertise to do it correctly. Well said, there was a question that came into. So with video being more and more important for demand creation, how do you recommend percentage of budget split for them versus different ad types? So I'll take an initial, my point of view, and then I'll turn it over to Lynn and Ryan.
But I do think that video is an absolute must for most companies right now. LinkedIn is placing all of its bets on short form video and video content. They've communicated that more broadly and publicly. And I think we're seeing it too with the evolution of the algorithm within the app itself.
There's the video tab. So I think it's an important, it should be an important part of the flywheel. I think what you, when you think about that versus different ad types, that's a big question. It needs to think about more about, do you have the resources to consistently produce video for your audience and the right messaging at that frequency?
If you do, then that's where I think the percentage of budget comes into play. It's hard to say until you're able to run it for at least 30 days to understand what's your average GPM. Are you reaching the right job titles or you're reaching the right individuals? Are they engaging with your content?
And then you can make the adjustments to different ad types. But I'd recommend putting your tactics in one basket for a short period, test it, prove it out before you just say, okay, Q1, 25, 25% of our budget is going to go to video, 75% is going to go to static or carousel ads. I think that's just maybe the wrong way to think about it. I would encourage that experiment and test first and then see how that volume and demand is.
But, Melin Ryan, I don't know, you probably have a perspective here as well. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say like a percentage, right, a number, but I would say prioritize video for sure in your demand creation budget, prioritize that budget towards video because I do think video is a much more effective way to communicate and grab people's attention, especially from cold audiences for true demand creation as opposed to static. I think static works really well with audiences who are already familiar with your brand. They're more likely to pay attention to a banner for something that they already know of, right, of a brand that they already know of.
When it's a completely new brand new thing that's trying to be sold to them, it's really hard to capture their attention. I think that's where video really comes into play. So I would prioritize video if you can, if you have that production and tools available in your demand creation budget, try to prioritize video over static. And you started more to reengage people who may be familiar with your brand, who visited your website, who've seen your other ads, it could do that as well.
Yeah, these are all really good points to me by having a Melin sound. I agree with all of it. These words I'm about to say shortly, maybe longer than that, but live underneath those things. I love video, but I also want us to be careful of this idea of people like to consume content in different ways.
So I don't think, you know, as much as I love it, I would never say 100% just because sometimes when I'm scrolling and I'm looking for information, I want to see a video on how to, you know, set up offline tracking for LinkedIn or something, right? I just want to list it out so that I can walk away from it, come back to it, remember where it was. Video is very much, it's a great medium. I love it for things like case studies.
I have a video of any right now, 30 seconds, which is just these clips of happy customers. Just jump into every differentiation and positive experience that I've ever had with this company. And it's just like this highlight reel. And it's doing really well.
I've also seen private videos do really well. So I think it's definitely something to look into. I love CTV, I love it for enterprise, love these videos for retargeting on YouTube based on search terms. But I would just say that you're going to have to find out what your audience likes.
If you put a clip, if you run an ad that's a clip of a webinar, how does that compare to a single image versus a document versus a care of a seller versus anything else you can put out there? Is there any small signals you can get that says, okay, these people actually sit around and watch something. I've worked with a client who document ads, they just performed really well because when their audience saw them, they would swipe through them, they looked really professional. It was something they could easily consume and disseminate.
And that's just some of the good opportunities for them. Not every audience is going to be like that. So really looking into that and making sure you're doing what's best for your audience is going to be key. Well, thank you both.
I know we're coming up here on time. This has been a valuable conversation for myself and hopefully for everyone else that joined, we appreciate you taking the time. And now we're out of your day is a lot of time commitment. So do appreciate that.
I think the package is all up. It's really just about finding clarity around what you're trying to target, how you're trying to target and that wasted spin just comes naturally as you start looking closely at what your account is actually doing. So we're going to have another one of these conversations next month. So stay tuned.
We'll send a follow up recap after this video is ready to share. And thanks again for joining. Appreciate it. Thank you Ryan, Linda Megan.
Good to see everyone. Thanks for having me. Good to see everyone. All the questions.
Bye.