Welcome everybody, my name is Megan Bowen. I'm the CEO at Refine Labs. We do these B2B marketing roundtables once a month. And this month, our topic is paid search.
Want to spend a little bit of time before we kind of get into all of the juicy details to just set the context and just provide an overview of our perspective on how to think about paid search in 2025 and what that channel really is all about. So we view search as an intent channel or a demand capture channel. And it is really important that it is a very important channel that should be part of most B2B companies' channel mix overall. However, what we typically see is people have the wrong mindset in terms of what the channel should be used for.
And that can result in pretty significant overspending on the channel and a misalignment with what to expect in terms of results. So overall, we think you should be allocating the right amount of search budget for a high intent demand capture strategy, meaning there are going to be people that are going to search and they're going to be looking for the thing that you buy or the thing that you sell. And we want to make sure that our strategy is really anchored in keyword terms that are reflecting a higher intent. Obviously, Google has created a very successful company on the back of ads because it's very easy to spend money.
So the trick here is using it the right way and then spending the right amount of budget so that you eliminate waste and really find where you start to hit those diminishing returns. We see a lot of people try to use it like a demand creation channel, whether that's low intent terms or very broad terms. We just want to get our brand in front of people that are looking for us. That's really expensive and often doesn't lead to actual conversions.
And so that's one common trap that people fall into. And our experts here, CR and Dale, are going to go through a bunch more specifics of how to think about this so that you can really drive the best ROI. We're going to save paid social for another topic. But the reason why we want to be really intentional and efficient with the Google Search channel is because there are a lot of other channels that your audience is spending time on.
And we want to make sure we have budget allocated for that. So in terms of brand awareness or demand creation strategies, there are other places that you should be allocating paid advertising budget to support those types of strategies and not on search. So the big question is always thinking through what's the channel mix, what is the right budget allocation. Almost every company that we end up working with will have anywhere from 60% to 80% of their total media budget on Google Search.
And typically, it's just way too much. It's pretty interesting how we're often able to actually reduce the amount that people are spending on Google Search and drive the same or better results simply by making changes to how your budget is deployed and your overall strategy. And that's what we want to be thinking about. It is an important channel.
It's an intent-demand capture channel. You have to use it the right way. And then separately, you have to think about this more holistically and not put too much of your budget all in this one basket and be thinking about ways to diversify that. So I'm excited to get into the details today.
I'd like to introduce Ciara Hopkins. She has our VP of demand. Dale Harper is a Performance Marketing Manager here at Refine Labs. We actually have a sneak peek at the 2025 paid search playbook that we just published in the vault.
So we're going to share some of those resources and walk through some great topics today on what's changed, the most important things that you need to be thinking about. Quick plug, if you are interested in getting access, check out the vault. You can get access to this playbook and a ton of others that we're publishing this year. But without further ado, let me welcome our paid search experts to the stage.
Ciara and Dale are so excited to have you here. And looking forward to having you guys walk us through all the great updates you made to our playbook. Thanks, Megan. It's great to be here.
Love to see all the engagement today. And we're excited to dig into it. Dale, you think that I'm going to go into my little intro. Yeah, we're excited to be here.
And yeah, I'll jump into my stuff and you're in a second. But I'm excited to share some of the highlights and changes that we made to the playbook. So, yeah. I want to echo that this is a capture demand channel.
And what we see a lot with some of our clients when they come in to start working with us is they're spending so much on search. And we do a lot of these audits on paid search and paid social. And with paid search, we just see a variety of different account structures, a variety of different keywords that they're bidding on. And we really try to do our best to make it as optimal as possible.
So you're spending the least amount of money by getting the most out of it. So what Dale and I are going to walk through today is really just kind of some of the big key pieces that we at least start to look at. And just to start to evaluate how we can get your account to a more optimal level and to increase your cost efficiency. This is it.
We're not going to go through the entire play with today. It's pretty extensive. But we just wanted to point out that just the big pieces that we find are at least an important place to start. And then as we're going through this, please leave us questions, even if you have like a burning question in your head right this second, you're like, how to make sure they talk about this.
Please feel free to put that in the chat. We want this to be a very kind of tactical and a little more of a technical discussion today. So we're happy to answer any and all questions about Google search strategy. But before I pass it to Dale, I just want to highlight.
So we went through this exercise of updating this playbook, not because Google's changing so much. I mean, Google, of course, is taking all of our money. We know it. And they want more of our money every single day.
But we just wanted to update the playbook because we also feel like certain things are changing in the market that we wanted to highlight. So we didn't actually update our core philosophy. This is a great demand channel. We want to make sure we're focusing on intent-based keywords.
All of that still remains the same. But we did make some updates on conversion tracking, which has kind of been a hot topic lately offline conversion tracking. We made some updates on some budget splits. I know Megan alluded to this too when she said we're spending too much on Google search.
So we made a little bit of updates there. We talked a little bit more about some of the bidding strategies that we recommend. And Dale will kind of walk through this today too. And then we really wanted to, obviously, you look on Google and you're seeing, just the visual, what you're seeing in Google is changing.
The UI is changing. So there are things that are changing for us on the advertising side of the house that we made some updates on. So we'll touch on a little bit of those today. And then, of course, if you have any questions, like I said, please feel free to ask them and we'll make sure we get to them as best as we can.
OK, cool. Dale, I think we should pop in. I think our first topic we want to talk about is just the general kind of account and campaign structure that we'll start with. And before we jump into the account structure, I wanted to share this.
You'll click here. I can make it big for now. I think this is a good transition into how we're talking about demand capture versus demand creation with Google. And what we're trying to accomplish, because I'll talk about a few key areas and highlight some of the changes that we made in the playbook.
But this is really the goal and what we're kind of expecting to see. So when we implement this structure and our recommendations on Google, this is what we're hoping to see, where you may even see on platform conversions decrease. But we're really trying to optimize for down funnel actions. We're seeing pipeline or hero or from click to hero or conversion to hero rates to improve.
And so kind of looking at this graphic of this is maybe a little bit exaggerated. But even if we see those in account conversions decrease, that's OK, because we're optimizing for higher-intended actions, which will lead to more closed one or key actions down the funnel. So I thought that would be a good transition to jump into account structure here. And there were a few updates, kind of a few recommendation updates and kind of clarifications we made.
But the core structure of what we're looking at with the account structure hasn't changed with this. We're still implementing the same segments, the same kind of strategies, and we're still seeing them work in Google. So this is still working. There's not going to be any overhaul, but there will be some recommendation changes.
And my goal with the highlights that I'm going to present here with the playbook is if you don't have access to this whole playbook, I want to give you at least the key pieces that you'll need to implement the skeleton of this search structure. So I will, without further ado, I'll end my preface and jump into this account structure. So we'll work a little bit backwards. And if anyone has questions about any of these items, go them in the chat.
We can stop to discuss a little bit further while we're on the topic. But we'll start with the ad group level and then move to our strategy for how we segment on the campaign level. At the ad group level, there are multiple strategies on how to structure ad groups. Two of the most common ones are what we recommend the single theme ad group.
And what we no longer recommend, and I don't think we have for some time at the single keyword ad group, the key difference between these is in a single keyword ad group, you will have one keyword, maybe multiple match types, but it's only going to be that single keyword in the ad group, which leads if you're targeting 50 keywords, you now have 50 different ad groups that you need to manage. We recommend the single theme where you take the keywords that you're targeting and you try to align based off of what this individual is searching, what messaging do they need, what are they actually looking for, what landing page experience do they need. And so if the messaging and the landing page experience aligns for that search term or that keyword that they're searching, we can put it in the same group, given the same ad and the same line page. And they'll still have that unique experience based off of their search.
But the benefits are we can now get some more strategic learnings and optimize the account a little bit quicker. So instead of trying to optimize for each individual keyword, we can say this theme, maybe you see one theme, search volume goes up one quarter and click the rate goes up and conversion goes up and you can say what's going on with this theme, maybe it's a use case that you group these keywords into. Why is there a lot more interest in this use case and that can inform beyond just page search? We can take that insight and say, maybe we need to run ads and promote this on a demand creation channel as well.
So it goes beyond page search, but it does help with the optimization in channels that both whoever is managing the ad account can learn quicker and make more realistic optimizations. And if you're running a smart dating strategy, like max conversions, Google can pick up on that data a little bit quicker and optimize in the account. I have a plug here too, Dale. At my job a long time ago when I was in paid media, I was running Google Search and I did a single keyword ad group.
And first off, it was my first time in Google Search. And I was like, oh, this is great. And then it took me so I took me a full 12 hours to build everything out, each keyword and to each ad group. And so then when I started out, we're fine.
And we had a stag model, single theme ad group. I was like, wow, this makes perfect sense. And so anyway, just outside of removing the work spent on managing your Google ads account, the stag model is really great. And also it's lovely for reporting.
Kind of helps you combine things into groups. And we'll really kind of figure out, a better way to figure out what's working and what's not working from a theme perspective. So definitely this hasn't changed much for us, like Dale said. And so I would still recommend this to this day.
And if we're going through the process of a build where you define the keywords that you want to target, you organize them into themes, then there's one more step of sorting the keywords that we need to segment the keywords in. And this is how we segment on the campaign level. So if you have your theme spelt out with the keyword lists and each thing that you need to target, then we need to define which key, what the intent level of that keyword is. Is this just a general topic search where it's related to the industry, but you have no clue if it's someone researching for a college paper that they need to write for a class or if it's someone actually interested in buying.
So we'll sort those by if they include your brand name or competitor name, we can put it in a brand or competitor bucket, and then we'll split between high, medium and low intent. I'll spend a little bit of time on this slide, but I think it's a lot easier to visualize here in a couple slides. So I'll jump there here in a second. But over here on the right, you can see these terms are what we call intent tokens.
They're telling us, is whoever searching for this, are they interested in buying? Are they looking for an actual solution? Or are they just kind of curious what this term is? So terms like solution, system, platform are all indicators that they're looking for a solution.
Well, terms down here like how to would be maybe they're interested, but they're in a researching stage. So they're not ready to buy, but they're at least maybe in the market. So maybe we want to put a little bit of money there, but it's not as prioritized as these high intent keywords. One note I want to make here, like if your product category includes one of these high intent terms, so for example, learning management system, that's a type of software solution.
If someone's searching that they're not necessarily high intent, just because it has system in that keyword, they're searching for the general product there. So there is a little bit of nuance that needs to happen, that maybe there are some keywords that don't have what we would define as a high intent token that should be high intent or vice versa. So this is a good general rule to follow, but just be aware of exceptions for your specific industry. And I'll jump here.
This is a more visual of how we break this out. So we talked about the single theme ad groups. So here, kind of in the middle are the ad groups working out by theme. So you may, you're like financial planning or forecasting it.
Maybe a use case would be product. If you have multiple different products, it could be your different products or in different ad groups or kind of a mix of different use cases for each of your different products. You may want to have different ad groups for both where this use case for this product kind of lined up. Again, the rule is, can you align the messaging with the landing page?
And then at the campaign level, we have it. We fund brand first and then move down by intent level. So brand will be funded first, then high intent, which again, the line between high intent and medium intent is, does it have one of these intent tokens that you can see more examples of here, like best or tool or software would be included here? And then we can move on to medium intent where they may have some intent.
There may be maybe not market now, but the market soon. If you have the extra budget in Google and not a place to put it into migration, then that's definitely a good place to explore different types of keywords here in the medium intent campaign. A couple of call outs and CR, you're welcome to jump in and share something here as well. We added this funding priority with unique percentages.
That's kind of new with this version of the playbook. These are good guides for what we typically would recommend to spend for each of these types of campaigns. It's not going to be a hard and best rule. Kind of what you want to find is you want brand to be 70 plus percent compression share.
So if you need to spend a little bit more or if you have room to spend less, you can spend, you can adjust that percentage. And for the non-grant campaigns, you'd like to have at least 30 plus percent impression share. So if you're not reaching that with high intent at 75%, you may need to just pause medium intent and move that up. Other kind of notes that have been added with this version of the playbook are we added a note about competitor campaigns, where if those are performing well, it's not like a always recommendation, but if you want to try it or if they performed well historically, you can fund it.
Typically, we'd recommend putting that in between high and medium intent or in a similar level of medium intent when you're thinking about blending structure. And this isn't explicitly written out in the playbook, but I didn't want to bring up. I've seen several concerns about brand campaigns about, is it cannibalizing organic search or is it just stealing conversions from organic to make pay look better? And there's an analysis you can do to identify if that is the case.
But here's kind of my general thoughts and recommendation here with brand is if your account is below 30 conversions a month, which is a good cut off, or is Google having enough conversion volume to learn? It's probably a good idea to keep brand in there, because it's a relatively low cost campaign and it's a really good conversion driver that can help train your Google ads account to optimize for the non-brand. So you may want to leave it in there if you have low conversion volume on the account level, and then you can remove it as you increase this conversion rate, see more conversions if it makes sense if you think it actually is competing with organic search and you're just paying for a conversion that you would have had for free anyways. I think that's a general quick.
I think that's an important distinguishing point there, is the branded element. So you want to maintain, from my perspective and Dale's sharing this, that exposure to having your brand consistently show up for a period of time is you're pushing some other channels or alternative media motions, whether it's event, whether it's webinar, whether you have executive dinners. It is important to have that piece in my mind, because it reinforces the stigma to click. So on average, we see about a 50% increase in branded clicks when we have both a paid and an organic hand-in-hand running.
So in the short term, if you have the budget to fund that to learn the click volume, it's important. A lot of people like I don't have competitors in space. It doesn't matter. I don't have my brand there.
Sure, but I understand with all of the AI, and you guys might get in this, but all of the AI pushing search results on the page and a lot of different things, you just don't know where your brand will actually show up organically these days. So it's definitely a key component to our strategy. Yeah. I also want to, Dale, I want to call out just a little bit of a side conversation we're having in the chat just around utilizing search when you have a target ICP account list.
I think this is a really interesting topic that has to do with some of the campaign structures and do we even run on search if we have a target ICP account list. I've seen just with some of our other clients is that when you have an ICP account list, obviously that's an amazing thing to utilize for LinkedIn, which has the most premium targeting, and then of course, like any other style of ABM outreach that you are doing internally, I do still think it's important to prioritize or at least focus on Google search as well, because what I've actually seen with clients is when they have an account list or an ABM structure and some of their create demand channels, whether it's through like a display platform, ABM platform, or then of course using LinkedIn, I've seen that when you have that promoting into your create demand, it actually trickles into your capture demand really positively. So something I've seen is we have a lot of search live, and then before we launched ABM in our create demand channels, maybe about like 20 to 30% of the search conversions were coming in from some of the folks on the target account list, and right, this is before we even target like hyper target and create demand. And then when we targeted and create demand, it actually switched to like 50 to 60% of the ratio of Google search conversions came from that targeted account list, and that was in both brand and non-brand.
So it is still important to utilize Google search, even if you do have like a hyper targeted structure, because folks are buying in different ways, like they might see your ad and like not think about it on LinkedIn, and maybe not think about your brand, and then search for something non-branded because they're interested in a software, and then your brand shows up in the non-branded keyword in the ad results, and they're like, oh, yeah, actually, I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. I saw that.
So I'm going to click on that. So those are the type of things too we really like to recommend, even if you have a hyper targeted strategy for your create demand channels. And unless it's a very tight list, and you can see us can only talk to that very tight list, then as Sierra was mentioning with what we've seen, it still makes sense to run that demand capture on search. That's kind of the whole overarching big picture strategy is, we're expecting that we're informing and educating on demand creation, and we're running demand capture channels beyond just paid search to capture that demand when they're actually in market.
So that was the overview of account structure. There are two other highlights from the updated playbook I wanted to jump into. The next is bidding methods, which Sierra did mention, as there are some recommendations here that changed. I'll kind of go into really anything with a playbook.
It's learn the rules, but also learn when to break them. So I'll kind of go through some common exceptions or maybe some areas where you can bend the rules here with the bidding methods. But the change that we made isn't really a strategy to change is more Google's changing. And I think it's something to certainly be aware of, where we used to recommend using enhanced CPC whenever you're launching a new campaign.
There were occasionally exceptions, but that's what you start with, and then you can explore other bidding options. Google has removed the option to use enhanced CPC, which if you're not familiar with what it was, you could set a bid and then you were giving Google permission to increase your bid by, I think it was 15%. So now you don't have that option. We can only use manual CPC, so whatever your bid is, you will never spend more than that very click when you set that as your bid in Google.
One distinction here is that you don't get any of the Google learnings, at least at the bid level, when you're using manual CPC. We still recommend it as a starter, but it may be something that you may want to test using a max conversion bid strategy a little bit earlier, as long as you have some sort of conversion volume to see if that helps lower your cost per conversion, because Google has a lot of information in the background that we don't get access to, that these smart bidding strategies like max conversions will take into account. ECPC would take into account where Google thought this was a high chance that they would convert, it would bid up as much as it could to get you high in that option. But that rant over, we still recommend starting with manual CPC.
The reason for that is it gives you a lot more control, especially most adequately work with, have been optimizing for a variety of different conversions, whether they're gated content downloads or non-handraiser conversions, essentially, along with a demo request or a price request conversion. So you need to retrain Google when you're moving to optimizing for only those high-end hand-hanger-hase or conversions like a demo request. You need to retrain Google to know when to optimize what to optimize for, who these people are, because it has a lot less data, especially if the conversions weren't split out by high versus low-income conversions. So we still recommend starting with manual CPC.
The gate to start testing max conversions, this is what Google recommends and is the best case scenario, is if you have 30 conversions in the last 30 days, so averaging about a conversion a day, then that's a Google has enough information to test max conversions. I'll give you some leeway here. A lot of times, if sometimes I'm running an app at a Google Ads account, and we can't get past 10 or 15 conversions with a budget with everything set up, I've run kind of AD tests on a specific campaign, not account-wide, to see if max conversions help improve. A lot of times it still does, even if you're not at that 30 conversions a day.
But the benefit of max conversions, I guess the downsides, you don't get to set the bit anymore, but you get to benefit from all the Google learnings. The next step, if you're getting more conversions, but your cost per conversion isn't where you want it. If you've been running max conversions for a month and a half, two months, and it's working well, you can start testing a target CPA bid. If you run this set the bit high, maybe even a little bit higher than what your current cost per conversion is, and then every two weeks decrease it by about 10 percent, as long as you're still spending the full budget and reaching that cost per conversion goal.
Some caveats here, I would not consider running TCA, target CPA, TCA, unless you have at least those 30 conversions, it needs a lot more data to really effectively run. A lot of times, even at that 30 conversion threshold, you're going to see worse performance with target CPA, it really performs much better with lots of conversion volume, hit both historically and recently. It's my word of caution if you're running max conversions. Just be aware of that if you decide to run target CPA.
That's my spiel on bidding updates. I think this is something important to keep in mind though, that we're trying to get those high-income versions, and we're trying to drive them down funnel. I won't go over this on this. I won't go over the slide here, but Ciara did mention that we updated recommendations for getting offline conversions into Google, especially if it's an offline conversion that is pretty shortly after that high-income version.
For example, if you have a conversion where a demo is to schedule a meeting, and then you have a conversion where a paid access showed up to a meeting, if you can read that back into Google, that's a great conversion to optimize for. It can help you drive higher quality conversions once you kind of hit some good baseline high-income submissions. It's still good to have the data. Maybe you don't want to optimize the campaign support necessarily, but the data for other pipeline stages, especially close ones, so you can at least have that data to see where are these highest quality conversions coming from within the platform, and that may be able to change some tactical decisions on the keyword or ad level.
Just with the offline conversion tracking too, it's something that we really talk to our clients about at the beginning, or even just in any part of our journey with them. We just find it does work really well on Google, just because of the lack of course of targeting. We've seen it really improve quality of conversions, so if it's something you are able to do in your Google Search account to connect either your CRM to Google, or have been manually upload some conversions and meetings, like Dale said, to your Google Search account, that's a very valuable tool to use to utilize. And this next section, there were some changes to the section, and I may actually jump ahead some sides before I work backwards to some extent, but we did make some updates to how we recommend writing and building ads in Google.
Our end goal here hasn't changed, but some of the tactical decisions that we make have changed based off of changes within Google. One of the key changes is we used to recommend, for the most part, headlines were unpend, and we would have one or two headlines pinned at number one, that would have some sort of topical part of the headline related to the theme of ad group, and then it also includes your brand name. With Google making your brand name and logo more prominent on the ads, with this business name and business logo, a asset, I'm still saying extension, but Google has changed extensions to assets. With making that more prominent, you don't necessarily have to have your brand name in a pinned first headline.
You still can, I don't think it's a bad thing, it makes your brand more prominent, and the idea there was most people don't click on Google ads, you don't pay unless they click, might as well make the most of that impression as you possibly can by getting your brand very front and center. So we're not recommending it as you have to, it's still something you can take into consideration if there's room when writing the headlines. But with that in mind, we change your recommendation to be a little bit more aggressive with pending headlines. So we want to write ads that still makes the Google robots happy, so you get favorable cost for clicks, but you want to write ads that are meant for people who are searching.
You don't want ads that are sound very repetitive, or just a bunch of keywords in a row with no real information. We want to include a variety of different topics, think social proof, key features and benefits of your product, different products that you may have. You want to include all of them ad copy, but you're giving Google 10 to 15 headlines with the ad. And so sometimes you may be sharing maybe not the same, like you want to avoid saying the same thing in different ways, but you're still sharing here's a list of social proof that I want to include headlines here is a list of CTA's or here's a list of features and benefits of the product.
And you probably want a good variety of that every time your ad shows up. So using a variety of pens, so you can have a few headlines that are pen number one related specifically to the theme. The media few headlines pending number two relating specifically to benefits or features. And then a few headlines of feature in position three that are related to social proof or call to actions.
And that gives a good headline that they see different pieces. And it gives as long as you have multiple pending in each position, it gives Google several headlines to still test and optimize. One exception, well, not necessarily an exception, but if you have lots and lots of conversions, you're getting maybe hundreds of conversions a month, high-income conversions in your Google ads campaign. You may want to test this versus a completely un-pinned method and just see how well does Google know how to optimize what headlines should go where, because Google performs much better the more data you feed it.
This is kind of a continuum of what I ran through. These check marks, I think, are a good kind of list to review. We want to mix up the headlines. We don't want lots of synonyms or saying the same thing different ways.
It's ideal to source many of the headlines and descriptions, or at least pieces of them from the landing gauges. If you're connecting the ad to the landing page, it makes for a smoother experience. You'll see it may not directly lead to conversion rates, but at least you're not going to line up the landing page and wonder, is this the right place? Including social proof, as I mentioned, common use cases and the awards.
And then you want to use all the description options and make those as built as you can. So good things to keep in mind. One thing to note, I think Google ad copy has a lot of times set it and forget it and just let it run. It's good to go back and refresh the ad copy.
There have been lots of times where I build a new campaign or new account structure with these campaigns. I think that ad copy is really good. I go back and refresh it two or three months later. Performance increases 10%, 15% immediately.
So don't neglect the ad copy. You don't just assume you did it perfect the first time. It's something to continue reviewing and iterating on. And I've shown this slide before.
I won't spend too much time here, so that we can jump into some discussion topics but the call here is use as many assets as are applicable to your business, except for the lead form extension. We found that's low quality leads coming through that increases your cost per click, oftentimes as well. So include these ones highlighted in green, we recommend including every time these highlighted in blue makes sense kind of depending on your business and what you're offering is set up. So Neil, quick question.
Do you find for this that the value of adding all the extensions there just because like the service constantly evolving so you don't know how your ad actually will show up? So some days you might see certain extensions while others you don't or what is kind of the recommendation behind that of for including all of these. Now the idea behind it, it's largely, it's getting your ad to take as much space on the service as possible, it's kind of the baseline there of, if your ad takes up more space, even if it doesn't get the click, like the idea is it should increase the click to the rate, but even if it doesn't, at least you're getting that impression. Depending on the asset or extension, it oftentimes provides a better end user experience.
So if your landing page doesn't quite line up with the search term as much effort as we're trying to make sure there's a line, you're giving them other options with cycling extensions or if they are searching for one thing but they're kind of hoping for a tool with both options A and B and one tool, then maybe your structured snippet can kind of give to them some insight into everything that you cover. So it's both a taking up space to get those clicks but also it provides more options to that end user. Awesome, appreciate that. I wanted to jump in.
I think Dale and Ciara, you guys are reviewing new ad accounts regularly as we bring new customers on that we work with at Refine Labs. I think it would be helpful to call out what are a couple of common missteps that you see that are typically caught when we do our full paid search media audit in onboarding. I know we often see a lot of the same things and we end up calling out those observations and making recommendations for some specific changes. So as we kind of audience warms up and if anyone has any questions, definitely drop them in the chat or unmute, we'd love to hear from you.
But I think it'd be cool if you guys could share a couple of common trends that you see and what we recommend. I can jump in and then I'll pass it off to Ciara to see what she has to add. I think the one that I guess is if you want to run the Refine Labs structure, the one that slows us down when we launch the structure the most is how the conversion tracking is set up. And so if they're optimizing for just any form fail or sometimes you'll see included like key pages, page visits on there.
And so that's training Google in the background of these are the most important people. And then when we come in and say, OK, Google ignore all that history of data you have, we actually only want to focus on these people. If those conversions aren't broken out separately, it slows it down but also just including those low into conversions can they get tricky to try to get those hand-raisers jumping in there. So that'd be the key one that I point out first.
Ciara, you're welcome to jump in and add whatever else you want. Yeah, now that's a good one, Dale. I think it also the same vein of conversions. One thing that we make sure we do not just in our audits but as quarterly or as often as we feel appropriate is really looking at the keywords that are not converting or keywords that have low engagement.
And we'll tie that a lot in our beginning audience. Like you guys are bidding on all these keywords but they're not converting, they're not performing well for you. And then we can kind of say this is spend that we could be reallocating into keywords that actually are converting for you. So we obviously will do campaign analysis, structural analysis, but the big piece that I think our clients really enjoy is like you are wasting money here and we know where to put this money in order to reallocate it and have it be more efficient for you and more valuable for you.
So I would say it's a varying level of wasted spend but it's something that we are very keen on making sure we continue to evaluate for our clients. What about competitor bidding, competitor keywords? It comes up a lot and I think people feel really strongly that they always want to bet on their competitors' brand names because they think, oh, my ad will show up and then I'm going to steal that customer. I feel like when you think about it, just like from a buyer's perspective, if you're actually typing in the brand name of a competitor, you have a lot of intent to go to them directly first.
What do you guys see in the data in terms of when it makes sense to think about including that in your strategy or not? It actually comes up on a lot of calls that I have. So I know it's a common question that people have is I wanted to throw it out there. What do you talk about?
I've noted it's kind of a, it works or it doesn't kind of strategy. So I'm not against trying it ever, but I think it's something too, you need to monitor it closely and be ready to turn the campaign off if it's not working. Another note here is, as Megan, as you mentioned, most people, if they're searching for a competitor, they've kind of either had them, mines made up or they're currently a customer and they're just trying to log in. And so if you're not careful with how you set this campaign up, you're going to get a lot of really irrelevant useless traffic to your site.
So if you're running that, only run high-intent competitor keywords. So it's going to be pretty low volume, usually fairly low spend. So you want to target competitor alternatives. And so people searching that you can tell either they're deciding whether to use the competitor or they're actively trying to switch away from the competitor, that's a place where you could actually have your ad show up.
I'd be careful with anything else, just like a phrase match with a competitor's name, for example. Yeah. Awesome. We're getting some questions rolling in.
Let's bring some folks on Kelvin. Do you want to unmute and ask your question live? Sure. Hey, everyone.
Yeah, so one of my campaigns keeps on getting spam or just like junk info. And I've tried all the things that capture, making sure that it only accepts what email addresses, trying to make changes to the ad itself. It's sort of the type in itself. But yeah, I'm not sure what to do.
So this gives me lots of that. Yeah. It's a tricky one to keep in mind that it could be a number of things. The first, I guess the first one in any way you've already done this is, have you turned off both the display expansion and the search partners expansion?
Because a lot of times I see a lot of spam comes through there. Yeah, we don't do those. And I also, at one point, I just did exact just to see if that will work and then sort of expand from there. But yeah.
My question was up right there. I'll get back on that. Are you confident those keywords are actually what you want to be buying? If you're seeing mostly junk come in, my gut reaction would be to evaluate that keyword list.
There's probably the 80-20 role there, where there's three keywords that are just driving a bunch of trash. I don't know the business out of the background, but I'm just curious on your thoughts there. Is that the pure driver of form-filled for your site? And it's just getting junk as well.
Yeah, that's a good question. It's actually sort of an experimental campaign to be honest. So just like in tech companies, we've launched AI tools. So trying to get in on that research because it will take a while to do organic.
But it's specifically about AI tools in our industry. So it's very like a smaller budget. But yeah, just frustrating because it's throwing off conversions and stuff like that. But yeah, it's an experimental thing.
So maybe you're probably right. Maybe it's not even the right campaign, but just something we're trying. No, if it's low enough convert, it can be tricky to figure out exactly why this game is coming in. But if it's going on conversions, you can always separate the conversion action out.
And then if you can separate that out to a different section, so only this campaign is optimizing for it. I don't know if it's a different landing page or how that set up. But that way you're not impacting the conversion optimization for all the other campaigns and kind of ruining the whole account for Google to start optimizing for spam leads. Makes sense.
All right, thanks, Kelvin. We have a few more questions, I think, in the chat. Stan, you're up next. Please correct me if I mispronounced your name.
But you have a question on how to maximize quality score. Yeah, indeed. Can you all hear me? Yeah.
Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Dale, was really looking forward to this edition. It's been really informative so far.
I think it's good to give some contacts before I get the answer. Like, it depends. We are like a B2B high ticket leadership training service. So we offer managers training on science-based management and how to treat people.
So you want more motivated, et cetera? And our main strategy is just running them to our service page with Google. And then basically we have something like, how does it call again? We have an IP detector.
So we have different servers, like the upfront, for example. And it catches about 30% to 40% of the companies that come on that page. So that gives us an indication, OK, look, someone is looking for a solution. Maybe it's the HR director of that company.
And then we tried to get in contact with them via LinkedIn, et cetera. But at the same time, we also have a quiz that tells the visitor how motivating they are according to science at managing people. And they need to leave their telephone numbers to get the results. So this is also a way that we can get in contact with these people if they don't convert to our contact forms.
But the problem is what we're seeing, and this is a problem that's mostly been pushed to me by the director, is the quality score of this page is very low. So my main objective is, I'm not saying that the quality score is the most important thing, but I think it's good to at least improve the experience of the landing page. And my current method is to look at the top organic results for the keywords, to see what organically comes up at the top, and to interview the people that we can actually get in touch with. And as a third and final one is to look at the screen recordings.
But I was just wondering, in your experience, is it worth caring about landing page experience? And what would be the best method to improve that if so? Yeah, so yes, landing page experience, it's obviously going to matter because if it's not converting, it's not going to get what you want from Google. Sometimes you'll see it's converting fine, but Google just doesn't like it, however it's algorithm set up.
So it's not something I typically spend tons of time on, but there are a couple of quicker fixes where a lot of times if you implement these, you'll see some sort of improvement to the landing page experience quality score. So the two I look at are what keywords are you bidding on that are sending to this page? And can you fit topics like that into the copy? So it's a little more, I think of it like SEO for those keywords that you're bidding on.
Obviously, we want to keep the experience good. We don't want to avoid anything like keyword stuffing. But if there's a natural way that you can fit those keywords in, Google likes that. And Google's been trying to pay a lot more attention to our people staying on the page.
How's the page speed? Specifically mobile page speed. So that could be something just to check that, use Google's tool to check the mobile page speed and see what it recommends to improve that. Those would be the first two areas to look that oftentimes lead to quick wins there.
Yeah, thanks. We did do that. And we're quick at the most ask that come up when it comes to page loading. So what do you, for example, think about looking at the organic results and structuring your page in a way similar to them?
I'm curious if someone else has thought about this. My kind of summarized version is it's worth a try. I don't think it's going to hurt. Yeah, I guess my concern with that potentially is the organic hasn't caught up to potentially the narrative that you're trying to speak to.
So there could be a scenario where you're matching one that's maybe irrelevant to what the audience is searching now or chasing now. That's an initial gut reaction when I think about like a myriad one to one. Yeah, thanks. That's a good insight, definitely.
Awesome. Yeah, so thanks for the question. I think that will bring further in. Getting calls with these people that landed on our pages I think is the ideal.
I have to get that is another question. But thanks, I appreciate the answer. Yeah, come back to I would love to hear how you're explaining this in future calls too and always reach out to us because we have these questions constantly and it picks a lot of absorb process and think of alternative solutions. So, thanks.
Awesome. We're coming up on time. But I wanted to get Chris. I wanted to get you on so you could ask your question.
And this can be the last one before we wrap up the round table for today. Good to see you, Chris. Welcome. I appreciate it.
Yeah, my question is, do you look at, quote unquote, attribution for paid search beyond last quit click and how much weight do you put behind that? So for example, let's say a prospect clicks on your ad today. They put around, but then they don't convert. They come back next week, fill out a form.
CRM is saying, hey, this was direct organic search branded. How do you then connect the dots to say paid search had a contribution here? I've got my own experiments that I've run, but curious, your take on all of this. Let me sit on this one for just one second.
I'm like, mapping it out of my mind. Yeah, it was a brain vendor that I had to work through too. What sort of you? Oh, go ahead.
No, no, go ahead. I was just going to, I was like, hmm, on mute. What tools do you have internally? Do you have any attribution tools?
Yeah, so it varies. When I've tested this in the past, I've used site visitor ID tools at a company level. And that's allowed me to basically see company X clicked on paid search ad. And I can track that by the UTM parameters on date Y.
And then return to the date Z fill out a form again. CRM saying maybe direct in how did you hear about us? They're saying Google or search. So I'm pretty confident that paid search played a big role and then binding up about the brand, probably doing some research shopping around and coming back to convert.
I think that's just, again, it's not the same thought process. As like, if someone sees ad clicks ad converts, it's easy to say, like, hey, this is how much paid search is contributed versus now it's like, all right, what else contributed to this lead opportunity revenue? So on and so forth. Yeah, do you have your CRM linked to your search account?
Mm-hmm. It might be good to utilize some of the metrics in Google Ads because it has a look back window. And so utilizing the conversion actions in Google Ads might give you, it's gonna inflate what you have in Salesforce because just because of that look back, you don't typically see, obviously, more conversions in Google Ads than Salesforce or your CRM or whatever it is. So it might be interesting to utilize some of just the information you're getting in Google Ads if you don't have like a full-fledged attribution software, which I'm not saying I recommend.
But that's where start is looking at, and making sure your conversion actions in Google are very specific to the conversion that you're trying to measure. That's my guess. I was gonna say follow up question if you don't mind me getting two for one here as you're working with clients and then trying to say, like, hey, this is what is efficient versus this is what is potentially inefficient or wasteful. Are you taking this effect into account, knowing that even some quote-unquote high intent terms that have those like software or tool modifiers can still happen in like the middle of a buyer during a research process.
So particularly for the enterprise space, those buyers might not be converting off of one click, but that visit is still going to be critical in terms of like their research process in buyer journey. Yeah, so what I looked at and I don't feel free to jump in, but what I've looked at is also utilizing Google Analytics. So if you're seeing a campaign or keyword that has a high amount of clicks, a high amount of traffic, and then the Google Analytics is showing, you know, a good time on site, like a lower bounce rate, we can really kind of infer that that is like, at least a higher quality keyword or campaign if you're looking at it that way. And then you can kind of compare conversions as well, because a lot of times we'll see two of clients as low conversions on a keyword or a campaign, but high traffic from a keyword and campaign.
And so it's important to make sure balancing both of those things because we don't want to just turn things off because it all conversions or turn things off because it has low traffic or high conversions. So that's kind of off the top of my head what I would consider and map out internally for you and make sure you're continuing to look at. Gotcha, okay cool. I like looking at GA4 at the keyword level.
I haven't thought of that, so appreciate it. Yes, absolutely, cool. All right, I know we're just about done for today. Thank you for the question, Chris, and for everyone that came on.
Thank you to Dale and Ciara for sharing all of your expertise. Keep an eye out, I know we'll get this recording posted to YouTube and we'll be back next month with our next B2B marketing round table. It was good to see you all. Thank you guys for your attention, your engagement, your questions, and look forward to seeing you guys next month.
Take care, everyone. Yeah!