Google Ads strategy to scale opportunities at a cheaper cost and a more efficient CPA
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Client Background
Secureframe is a security compliance and automation solution whose mission is to empower businesses to streamline and simplify their compliance processes. Secureframe helps businesses from startups to enterprises get compliant with their easy-to-use, all-in-one AI-powered compliance software.
Challenge
Secureframe wanted to scale their Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) volume while improving lead CPA efficiency in Q4 and through Q1. This posed two challenges. First, their targeted audience typically drops off during the holiday season. Second, competition intensifies at the start of the year as competitors gear up with fresh annual budgets.
JDM Approach
JDM aligned with the Secureframe team on what their target CPA goal for leads would be by working backwards from Closed Won goals.
Next, the JDM team did a deep dive into the Google Ads account to identify areas of opportunity and areas to either retest or pause to improve efficiency.
Strategy
We pulled various analyses looking at keyword, ad group, campaign, and framework levels. We broke them down into MoM, QoQ, and YoY.We identified which campaigns, ad groups, and keywords should be reactivated or paused based on historical performance. A review of spend allocation by compliance framework to see spends in various timeframes versus now allowed us to determine the most efficient levels of spending. We noted which frameworks/campaigns drove long-term value and down funnel opportunities to revisit or explore further.
From there, we were able to restructure campaigns to incorporate historical top performers and added new responsive search ads (RSAs) to improve our ad rank, messaging, and initial KPIs like CTR to help drive users to the site at a stronger, more efficient rate.
Once we were able to refine our approach, we sought to further expand and test in a few different key areas.
- Target expansion: We expanded targeting into additional countries with higher likelihood of conversions.
- Keyword expansion: We expanded general compliance keyword targeting to test new opportunities.
- Bid strategy testing: We tested target CPA bidding on campaigns that were previously using an impression share bid strategy. This allowed us to signal to Google that we no longer prioritized impression share and that we wanted to find users who were more likely to convert at a cheaper cost.
- Conversion goal optimization testing: This allowed us to signal to Google that we wanted them to find users more likely to convert at a lower conversion stage in the funnel (i.e. SQLs instead of leads).
The Results
Through these efforts, we were able to increase pipeline by 12% with a 4% decrease in spend. Quarter over quarter, we also achieved:- 66% decrease in CPC
- 12% increase in lead volume
- 11% decrease in CPL
- 9% increase in total SQL volume
- 12% decrease in cost per SQL