“Every marketeer wants more leads for less but it can’t be at the cost of quality. Working with the team of experts at Wolfgang, we were able to improve tracking, engineer optimizations and drive higher value with quality leads for our global sales teams.”
Dee Sarsfield – Senior Director, Demand Generation
Paid Search & SEO
Cost per sales qualified lead fell by 68% allowing us to drive 43% more qualified leads from just an 8% increase in media spend.
Having had great success in increasing the quantity of leads driven by paid search, we were tasked with improving the quality of leads for Kemp Technologies, an international B2B SaaS company. Kemp Technologies were recently acquired by Progress Software.
When we began working with Kemp Technologies our objective was to grow the quantity of leads coming through their search channels. For paid search, this meant putting a big focus on optimising the campaigns based on the areas that were driving the most leads and we were very successful in doing this with Kemp’s paid search lead volume up 121% YoY in Q1 2021. However, the high quantity of leads coming through began to cause issues for their sales team as more leads meant a lot more work was required to identify the high-quality leads amid the ‘noise’ created by poor quality leads. Following discussion with the client, we decided to refocus our strategy from focusing on driving lead volume to focusing on driving high quality leads. This is easier said than done as while we had plenty of data around lead quantity, we had no data which told us anything about lead quality that we could use to optimise our campaigns.
We started working very closely with Kemp’s sales teams, getting regular feedback on the quality of the leads they were seeing coming through. However, we weren’t able to see whether specific keywords or ads were driving high or low quality leads which meant that optimising our paid search campaigns for lead quality was very difficult.
We decided to try to integrate our Google Ads accounts with their CRM platforms, Marketo. This would allow us to include the Google click ID in any lead that came through from a paid search ad which allowed their sales team to know whether a specific lead came from Google Ads. It also allowed us to keep an eye on how each paid search lead progressed through the sales funnel. This meant that we could schedule a regular upload of the CRM data and as a lead progressed through each stage of the sales funnel, Google Ads know which elements were driving validated leads. By applying values to each stage of the funnel we could make sure our budget was going to the most profitable campaigns and could even feed this data into Google’s automated bidding strategies to make them more effective in driving customers and not just leads.
Previously we had been focusing our coverage on less competitive, and therefore cheaper, keywords in an effort to make our paid search budget drive as much traffic and as many leads as possible. Once we began to see lead quality data in our Google Ads account we realised that the more competitive, more expensive keywords were actually driving higher quality leads so we decided to recalibrate our strategy to get more coverage on these areas. Counter-intuitively, our strategy moved towards driving less traffic and fewer leads, focusing on driving enough high quality leads to ultimately drive more business.
The more data we gathered, the more effectively we could optimise our campaigns to improve lead quality. In the
Americas, our priority region, the rate that leads went on to become sales qualified leads (SQLs) more than doubled,
increasing by 136%.
The cost per SQL fell by 68% allowing us to drive 238% more SQLs from just an 8% increase in media spend.
Our new strategy means that not only are the sales team receiving more relevant leads, but there is less ‘noise’ giving them
more time to differentiate the leads with high potential from the rest and dedicate more time to nurturing these
relationships.
+136%
Lead > SQL rate
-68%
Cost per SQL
+238%
SQL Volume
