Right. Ryan, what is the best snack in your house right now? If I told you to go to your pantry and bring something back for me, what would it be? Best snack in my house right now.
It wouldn't be in the pantry. It would be in the freezer. And my family's really gotten into frozen cookie dough bites. You've been in Jerry cookie dough bites.
You keep me in the freezer. They got half day. They got sugar cookie. They got some more flavors.
Highly addicting, but just so good. Welcome back to Stacking Growth Snacks. I'm Steph Kneola and I'm here with Ryan O'Lestero, senior performance marketing manager at Refine Labs. And we are talking about running a paid search audit.
The last time we talked about why it's important, who should be involved, and what those steps look like. And today we're going to talk about what you do with the results. So you've got all of this information. You've turned off Ask Jeeves and you're ready to move forward.
What do you do with these results and insights once you have them? It's great to be back to talk about this. So this is really, really important here. The one thing you have to kind of do, and this is a big point, is you have to understand whether this needs to be an on off switch situation or a gradual change situation.
A lot of times these things aren't black and white. There's gradients here. So knowing kind of how to make these slow changes and kind of set these changes in optimizations over time is going to be really crucial. The first thing I would do is I would take the things that I know for sure have to be changed.
So those are things like turning off search partners, making sure the location is present and that presence and interest. Those are two that you're almost always, those are on, you're just turning them off immediately. Others, you have to wait out. So for example, let's say that they have campaigns on and they're getting conversions from mobile.
And historically, B2B mobile doesn't convert as well. And if it does convert, the quality is kind of shaky, but you're getting conversions. And so the question becomes, do I shut this off right now? Or do I wait until we fix apps problems and then see the quality down the line and then shut it off?
So that's the situation where I might talk to the team and go, you're getting conversions. We're now tracking these mobile conversions specifically using our tracking template. Let's set up the tracking template, keep it on and just see what the quality is for the next 30 days or so. If everything that comes in is garbage, now we can cut mobile.
We can save that money reinvested into some of our desk cap only campaigns. Just need a little bit of a tweak. So for example, issue, I come across as, hey, you have these campaigns, they're set to maximize conversions, but you're only getting 10 conversions a month. That's not enough data for this algorithm to actually work.
Google reps will tell you, well, they use to tell you, now they tell you just do it anyway, but they use to tell you, you need at least 30 a month to optimize one a day. And people come and they have next conversion set for multiple campaigns and it's not bringing a lot of conversions. I go, okay, let's really find the campaigns that we like. And let's just switch those bidding strategies to manual to just put me in there.
I don't want you to try to find me a conversion. I just want to be in these campaigns because I'm confident about these, these keywords. That's kind of an example of kind of a slow and fast change. Some of the things you can think about doing as well is a quick thing.
We have talked about this up at audiences, make sure audiences are in these campaigns. This is going to help you today, but it might help you in the future. So for example, in Google Ads, you can set up these audiences and audiences and things like enterprise software and CTE service. And these are large groups of people that Google tries to classify.
It doesn't do it very actively. So if you get them set up to begin with, if you start to see some success, you can start manipulating bids based on them. That's kind of like a long term set up that you can do. When I audit accounts, these are either not set up or not set up properly.
For example, they'll have 50 audiences in there, anything from gardeners to folk music lovers. They're just like, this is not a determining factor on if they're going to be right on my site. Someone in market for B&B services, that is a group of people who I want to pay attention to. So going in and setting that up, it's not going to tip the apple cart, but it's a fast kind of thing you can do just to make sure that, hey, month, month and a half, I'm going to be happy that I set this up because I might be able to use this information to make us that more profitable.
All throughout this time, you're level setting that expectations. The client might be used to no conversions, if so. Cool, like it's expectations are nothing. So as long as you beat nothing, you're good.
They might get a ton of conversions, right? So how do you shape that conversation? Understanding the levels that we're pulling and why we're pulling in so that everyone understands the strategy and the narrative so that they can explain it to anyone else in the company, to themselves, to some random person on the street is going to help you here. We are focusing on quality or quantity because the group can get you a lot of added conversions.
And we are only here to get you the best ones. That's kind of the first thing that I started to think about when it comes to really steering the ship the direction that we wanted to go. How often do you recommend running this audit? Because you make those minor or major changes, some of them are gradual, some of them are immediate.
How often do you go back in and recheck to see how those changes are working and make more changes? It depends on a couple of things. The number one thing it probably depends on is the website. Has the website gone through updates?
If the website gets updated, it's 50-50 chance that the form itself got updated. If there's been any updates in your CRM or your marketing automation platform, like, hey, we use a market now instead of using a card hat. Hey, we're switching from this to this. You're going to have to change the forms.
Your conversions are not fire. It has to be a fire. So it's one of those things where I would say every year would be safe. I would do it.
I would look at this thing probably about any time you change the website, maybe half a year. I would just go through the list again. What do I know has changed? How has our strategy changed over the last six months?
Anything like that? Because another scenario would be our audience is very different. We've had to change this strategy in lots of ways. This is where we started.
Now we don't use these but we use this strategy. We use this one. We've been finding some success here. Just having this, I went from A to B.
This is what I saw. It was really important. I would say what would be more valuable is probably a performance analysis. We do that here.
We find labs. We analyze it. From campaign keyword down to opportunities revenue. That is something that I would do probably twice a year.
Just to make sure we're on the right track. But once you have things set up, as long as you don't copy things wrong, you'll be okay. People get into trouble usually when they expand GOs. It's okay, you're going to be up.
You're actually not in a new UK and Ireland. You have 10 MBA campaigns in somewhere in UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Nordics. You're just like, okay, do we need a level set here and make sure we're all... Everything is where everything needs to be.
It's something you could go through lightly, probably once a year. That'd be my final answer. Put it in. Lock it in.
Lock it in. All right. One last question in this set. I think it seems pretty easy to identify waste where you're spending but you're not getting conversions.
You can use this data to explore gaps or opportunities that you're missing because that seems a lot more difficult to find the avenues that you should be but where you can get results that you're not actively spending. Usually what happens is people are overspending and they get to save money because they're not in as many things. However, you do want to maximize this channel to the fullest if it does have this potential in it. Like you mentioned, it's not good enough just to cut waste and think it's happy.
It's actually finding a way to make it sure you're there and you're getting everything you can get from it. Review of the keywords and campaigns from conversion to opportunity to revenue is going to be extremely important. That's where we've been. Once you know where you've been and what's working, you can have the rest and now it's down to expansion.
Where could we go from here? There's a couple schools without here. The two biggest ways to think about how to expand would be ideas like are these category keywords or these capability keywords. So what's the difference between that?
If it's a sales productivity software, that's the category. The capability is how do I have my reps hit the quota? It's like, okay, that could be a lot of different things. This thing does help you do that but they don't understand that there's a category that can help them get there.
It sounds like it goes a lot into the Refine Labs creating demand bucket where people might not know what they need but they know what they need it to do. They don't know what exists. They don't know who you are. They don't know the category but they know what they need for themselves and you can jump into that.
Yeah, 100%. We worked with a lot of different companies and we can't talk about this last episode with this whole, hey, we don't really want to be educating on page search because people go to page search and we want to already know what they want. We want to use page social to educate them on why this type of solution is what they need. The capability is kind of blends that line a little bit where people might not know the category but understand the capabilities that they want.
They've never heard of a letter but they did get on the roof. Those are two branches of expansion you can go into. I look at the website organic rankings. If they've been doing SEO, they've been around a while.
They likely have some SEO built up and I look at the phrases they're using. Is this anti-fraud? Is this about hacking? Is this about all these other things?
I go to the competitors. I usually go to a competitor that has been doing SEO really well and I'll start going through their organic keywords and I'll start digging in there. I'll start digging into competitors search keywords and what are they bidding on? It doesn't mean I trust it.
It doesn't mean it's working for them. Do not assume it's working for them but use the said spotter to say, okay, someone might be bidding on something like sales rep quality and you're like, I don't know if I have a 90 page that's really about quality of the take-ment. I have a 90 page that's about ramping a sales rep quickly. I have a 90 page that's about coaching and creating and learning opportunities for reps so that poor performing reps can become better performing reps.
But I don't have this kind of quality of the thing. So maybe I don't want to play there. So you take everything with a grain of salt and then you bring it back to the internal stakeholders because they know they're company best, right? The client's not the company best.
The product team knows the product best, the CMO knows the marketing the best. You say, is this a game you want to play? And they'll go, yes, this sits down the head. You have to be careful that yes, we can play here.
We don't really want to touch this. We just don't want to play this game. People come in asking for this, our poor quality, poor fit. They don't get through the process of waste of rep time.
We're not going here. So those are two using the SEO tool and digging into organic and paid search results is probably my favorite thing to do. All right, well, I love hearing your favorites. I have loved learning more about how you take all of those insights and move forward with them.
And next time we're going to talk about building a cohesive and unique strategy. You've talked a lot about getting everyone on the same page. We're going to do a little more of that in the next episode. So thank you so much, Ryan.
And we'll see you all next time. Yeah.