Paid Search

Trend Micro - Paid Search Case Study

Applied “revenue” values to Trend Micro’s various B2B lead goals to encourage the Google algorithm to prioritise their most valuable website actions, without sacrificing CPA or volume.

The work we did

THE CHALLENGE

Trend Micro is a leading Enterprise software security company, with Paid Search activity running across 17 countries and 7 languages.

Their sales funnel is a complex, multi-touch funnel that spans both online and offline activity. Because of this, Trend Micro’s website actions include both high-volume ‘soft’ goals (such as ungated PDF downloads) and high-intent but lower-volume goals (contacting the sales team through online forms). We needed to devise a strategy that encouraged Google’s smart algorithm to allocate more budget to higher intent audiences, but that continued to drive new audiences into the funnel (and take learnings from these user signals) via our softer actions.

OUR STRATEGY

Separate conversion actions were set up, tiered in relevancy from people at the researching phase (PDF Downloads) to people most likely to get in touch with the sales team and convert (Sales Contact Forms).
These goals were each given a “revenue” value.
To determine goal values, the sum total of each conversion action was divided against the sum total of offline sales revenue during a set period of time.

Campaigns previously set to Target CPA, were now set to Maximize Revenue. Because of their separate values, Google now had a better sense of which actions were most valuable to the business and could optimise accordingly.

INNOVATION USED

By assigning artificial revenue values to lead actions, we effectively turned a lead-gen client into a retail / eCommerce client from the perspective of Google Ads’ smart bidding AI. In doing so, we created an additional layer of data that Google previously would not have had eyes on – linking insights from the client’s offline sales data into the machine to better optimise performance.

BUSINESS GROWTH

Over a 6-month period, campaigns set to Maximize Revenue saw;

223% uplift in ROAS (control saw +32% ROAS)
56% increase in total leads (control saw +25%)
72% increase in high value leads (control saw +13.5%)

This campaign shows how humans can add value in this machine-learning world – we understood our client’s business and sales funnel, and layered business data into our campaigns to help the Google algorithm optimise towards the metrics that matter.