3. 3
Adwords Primer – Adwords allows you to advertise on specific
keywords that people use in Google searches
Key Concepts:
Keywords
Ad groups
Campaigns
Search terms
Negative Keywords
Match types
Bid strategy
Impressions,
clicks, conversions
Impression share
Page rank
Quality score
Definitions
• What we pay to advertise on, triggered by search terms
• Keywords are grouped into ad groups, where ads are defined
• Where budget, bid strategy and geography is set.
• The stuff people search in google, that matches with keywords
• What they sound like, keywords we don’t want to match with.
• Help align keywords with what we want them to match with.
• How to spend $$ on keywords
• The basic funnel of Adwords. Impressions are when an ad is
displayed, clicks are clicks, conversions are goals we set.
• The % of total possible matches in which your ads appear.
• The average position at which your ad appears, /results page
• A 1/10 composite ranking of: expected CTR, landing page
experience and conversion rate
4. 4
• Don’t go in ignorant! First, sit down and really think about what an ideal
potential client would actually search for in Google. Write down 10 – 20
keywords.
• Don’t go in blind! Use the Keyword planner tool to validate that these
keywords are actually used by lots of people. Seek out the relevant ones
with most volume. Use the keyword planner to add lots of new relevant
suggested keywords.
• When in doubt, start broad. You can optimize later, but you’ll never know
what you’re missing if you start too narrow.
• Start with a manual bid strategy around $900 COP/keyword. Adjust bid
up for high value keywords. After one week or ten conversions, switch to
“Target CPA” bidding.
How to Start – Starting with smart, validated keywords is key
5. 5
• Identify your high value keywords with low impression share (IS). These
are keywords that bring in lots of conversions, at low CPA, but are missing
out on potential impressions. You want to get these keywords to 80 – 100%
IS.
• Allocate budget and improve quality scores to drive up IS. Use the Lost IS
(Budget) and Lost IS (Rank) metrics to identify why you’re losing
impressions. Improve quality scores by improving CTR and landing page
experience.
How to Optimize – There are three broad types of optimization
Growth
Efficiency
Search term
• Identify keywords that are not performing and pause them. Sort KWs by
cost, or cost/click. Pause any leaders that don’t bring conversions. This
frees up budget for better keywords.
• Analyze your campaigns by devices, weeks of the day, landing pages and
other segmentations. See where you’re not performing well: maybe mobile
is great but your spending $$ on lots of tablet clicks that don’t convert.
Commit to improving that segment or pausing it.
• Target high volume keywords for search term optimization.
• Identify search terms that are high value (high probability of being a client)
and add that search term as a new keyword (consider what match type to
use when adding).
• Identify search terms that are low value (we don’t want the person who
searched this on our site) and add the search term as a negative keyword
(match type important as well.
6. 6
• Align the terminology used in your keywords, ad copy and landing pages. For
example the keyword “asesores comerciales bogota” should have an ad that says
“Asesores Comerciales en Bogota”, and the landing page headline should also
include “Asesores Comerciales”. This improves landing page experience by
preventing users from arriving on a page they weren’t expecting.
• Put real, serious thought into your ad copy. Why will someone click on this? Why
should anyone care? What specific claims will catch users eye and get them excited?
Bland, generic copy kills CTR.
• Use A/B testing and competition to optimize. Always have two or three ads running
per ad group. Every week or two, eliminate the lowest performer and add a new one.
See if you can get your new ad to out perform you best ads. Repeat.
• Use broad keywords to fish for high value, specific keywords. For example
“vendedor” itself is too broad to be a strong KW, but it’s useful for search term
optimization.
Other tips and best practices.
8. 8
The goal of marketing automation is to align your communication with the behavior of your users.
A user who signed up today, and a user who used your product for three weeks and then stopped
need different communication.
The key is to think in terms of triggers instead of newsletters. When a users does X, or when a user
hasn't done X, we want to reach out.
Marketing Automation – how to scale personalized communication with
users
Specific goals of automated
marketing:
• Convert prospects into signups
• Convert users into buyers
• Reactivate users
When does a newsletter make sense?
• Product feature updates
• Seasonal discounts/promotions
• Catastrophic bug status updates
• Periodic blog updates (within the
right user cohorts)
9. 9
Marketing Automation –Sophisticated, dynamic communication can be
fully automated, here’s an example.
Capture email
Send CTA to
create Job Post
Send Blog on
Sales Recruiting
Success!
Converts
Ignored
email
Example goal: Get a prospect to post a job with VincuVentas
Send CTA to
create Job Post
Clicks blog
Ignored
email
Send
promotional offer
Success!
Converts
Ignored
email
Send Calendly to
post job together
Converts
Success!
Lost! Add to periodic
newsletter list
Ignored
email
Ignored
email
How to optimize your marketing
funnel:
• Isolate where users drop off
• A/B test how to communicate your
value proposition
• Reduce confusion, identify the key
concepts a user must understand to
convert
• Experiment what type of content
drives conversions: promotions,
insights, personal emails, sales calls.
10. 10
You can create marketing funnels with limited coding
using these tools:
• GoSquared: User tracking. Users entering and exiting
Smart Groups serve as the triggers. GoSquared
integrates direcrlt with Drip and MailChimp.
• Zapier: Build “Zaps” that tell an application to do
something when a trigger happens, like send an email
when a user enters Smart Group A.
• Drip: Email marketing software that allows you to
create “Workflows”, aka marketing funnels that take
different actions depending on user actions. Great
product.
• MailChimp: Mailchimp is an email marketing software
primarily built for newsletters, but it also has
automation features. It’s reliance on fixed “lists”
however, makes Drip a better pure automation tool.
Creating robust marketing funnels can be done with minimal coding
using a combination of these tools.
11. 11
• Landing pages should be clear and simple. They
should directly tell the user what action to take.
• Fundamentally, great landing pages are made
through testing and competition and it’s not worth
overinvesting in weeks of ideation upfront. Use best
practices to create something quickly and iterate.
• It is worth thinking seriously about your value
proposition. Is it clear to someone who knows nothing
about your product?
• An underappreciated risk: what % of your signups did
it out of confusion or because they’re lost? Don’t
create a too effective landing page.
• Optimizely is a great tool for A/B testing landing
pages. Use experiments and ‘variations’ to test
different landing pages. Use ‘force parameters’ to
create specific landing pages in Optimizely, like for
when you want to align copy with an adwords ad.
Landing Pages are science. Testing and competition is better than your
intuition 100% of the time.
12. 12
• Use copy that mimics a personal email,
and make a direct ask.
• We increased the open rate of Vincu
Ex-Jeffes emails by 15% by using
simple text, rather than fancy,
designed templates. (Example on the
left).
• Avoid graphics, gifs, images.
• Use a question in subject lines, this
broadly resulted in a 6% increase in
open rates.
• One ask per email
• Competition and A/B testing yield better
results than your instincts.
B2B Email Marketing – a few lessons learned
