4 steps to increase enterprise software demo leads by 165% in 90 days

If your like most SaaS companies running AdWords to generate leads, you have at least 1 of these problems:

1. The full service digital marketing agency you hired last year is now just “going through the motions”
2. Your AdWords ad spend has grown so large, that your current ‘in-house team’ is no longer qualified to do the job
3. Your not getting as many new trial signups or booked demos as you’d like to hit your customer acquisition targets
4. You can never “scale” your AdWords campaign because you are not clear about your ROI

If you answered “Yes” to any of the above, then continue reading…

1 year ago I took over the AdWords management of one of Australia’s fastest growing SaaS companies.

They were spending a small monthly ad budget of $28,000 AUD per month on AdWords.

AdWords was 1 of the company’s primary customer acquisition channels.

Why?

Because of the quality of leads that come from Google with real “commercial intent”.

But when the CMO reached out to me, she had the following 2 problems:

1. Lack of communication from their current digital marketing agency (slow to return emails and phone calls)
2. Lack of results (no ROI to present to the management board)

All the past agencies the CMO had engaged… tried and failed.

Why?

Most agencies and in-house staff have never used their own ad money to learn how to make AdWords ROI.

The pain of using your own money, paying $16/click and needing to make AdWords work so your business can grow is completely different to spending a clients ad money.

I spent 7 years using my own AdWords budget to learn AdWords before ever creating an agency and taking on client #1.

So I know exactly where to look when something isn’t working.

We analysed the company’s AdWords account and put together a 3 month AdWords Campaign Plan to reach the CMO’s goal of a 40% increase in leads.

Here are the 4 steps we used to:

• Turn a failing AdWords campaign into a profitable winner
• Increase leads for this enterprise SaaS client by 165% in 90 days

Step 1: Would You Like To Spend $3,816.20 With Nothing To Show For It?

That is exactly what this company was doing…

The very first thing we did was a high-level analysis of every campaign in the account.

What did we find?

1 campaign targeting the Google Display Network had spent $3,816.20…

With no leads and no sales.

We paused the campaign.

The $600/month being spent on this 1 campaign was moved to a remarketing campaign that had already proven to generate leads and sales.

Result: We saved $600 ad budget per month

Step 2: Are You “In The Dark” About What Keywords Your Ad Money Is Being Spent On?

Most executives think that their ads only show for the keywords inside their AdWords account.

That assumption is incorrect.

Google makes more money by “broad matching” your keywords to other (less relevant) keywords.

To find which keywords Google is “broad matching” to you need to…

Study the search terms report.

The search terms report tells you the exact search phrases people searched for on Google when they clicked on your ad.

We identified all the irrelevant search terms from this report.

And added them as “negative keywords”.

So the client never had to pay for those irrelevant clicks EVER again.

Result: We saved $1,840.47 ad budget per month

Step 3: Is Your Account Being Pulled Down By ‘Inactive’ Keywords?

All keywords with no clicks in the last 6 months are pulling down your whole account.

Why?

Google gives your keywords a “Quality Score” based on how well your keywords/ads/landing pages matchup.

Your account also has a hidden “Quality Score”.

1 major component (39%) of Quality Score is “Expected CTR (Click Through Rate)”.

After 6 months, what do you think the expected click through rate of a keyword with 0 clicks is?

I’m guessing… 0%.

To improve the “Expected CTR” across the account, we filtered all the keywords with no clicks.

Then we hit ‘Pause’ on all of them.

They hadn’t got clicks for the last 6 months.

So they weren’t bringing the client any leads anyway.

Result: We “cleaned” the account so only the relevant keywords were remaining

Step 4: This Is The Secret To Making Your Ad BIGGER Than Your Competitors

2% of advertisers get 50% of the clicks.

The only way to be part of that 2% is by making your ad stand out on the search results page.

To do that you need to make your ad bigger than your competitors by…

Adding ad extensions.

These are items like star ratings, Google+ followers, links to other pages of your website, etc.

That is the reason why some ads you see are 6 lines big.

And some are only the default 3 lines (hint: those rookies aren’t using ad extensions).

Bigger is better!

The bigger your ad is…

• the more chance you have of getting clicks vs your competitors
• the more unique selling points you can show people
• the less you will pay per click (because Google rewards advertisers who have a high percentage of people who see their ad and click on it)

People clicking on your ad is a sign to Google that your ad is relevant to the person searching.

We added ad extensions to the client’s account and this is what happened…

Result: We increased the number of people who clicked on the ads by 47%

The CMO Wanted 40% Lead Growth. We Hit 165%!

Here is how the numbers shook out after we implemented the 4 steps:

Ad Savings: $2,440.47 per month ($29,285.64 per year)

Clicks: Increased by 39%

Leads: Increased by 165%

Cost Per Lead: Decreased by 193%

Conversion Rate: Increased by 203%

Here is the report we gave to the CMO after our initial 3 month engagement, to present to the management board.

It compares their past agency results (March, April and May) to the results we got after we took over their AdWords account management (June, July and August).

This is how the leads and sales numbers broke down for 165% growth in leads and sales:

My client in this case study sells an enterprise software product.

From the report you can see we went from generating 80 leads in March, April and May to 212 leads in June, July and August.

165% lead growth in 90 days.

My clients lead-to-sale conversion rate (from software demo to new customer) is 20%.

That means my client went from making 16 enterprise sales in 90 days to 42 enterprise sales in 90 days.

165% sales growth in 90 days.

But wait till you see what happened in the next 90 days…

The CMO and management board were so impressed with the results…

They wanted to double their ad budget and scale the campaign across multiple countries their company sells to.

Did the leads and sales numbers scale in proportion to the ad budget?

You bet they did.

With a 107% increase in ad budget, we got another 132% increase in leads and sales in 90 days.

And we did it by decreasing the cost per lead by a further 10%!

This 1 AdWords campaign grew my clients company by 50% month-over-month for 6 consecutive months!

This kind of growth is unheard of for a mature corporate SaaS company that has already been running for over 10 years.

And do you want to know the cold hard truth?

These types of results are common with our clients.

Why?

Most companies don’t know what they don’t know.

Do you want to see what we found when we peeked behind the curtain of billion dollar company Xero and their AdWords account?

$6,000 per month worth of potential ad savings:

We made similar findings when we analysed the Infusionsoft AdWords account as well.

$4,000 per month worth of potential ad savings:

If you don’t have a Quarterly AdWords optimisation plan…

Your leads and sales are falling through the cracks.

Even worse…

Maybe you have a plan, but your team or agency doesn’t know the advanced AdWords optimisations needed to take your account to the next level.

If you think you might be in this situation…

There’s A Sneaky “Hidden Reason” I Wrote This For You.

The first (and primary) reason was to show you how easy it can be to turnaround a stale AdWords account…

That can grow your leads and sales exponentially.

If you follow the 4 steps in this article, you can cut wasted ad spend from your AdWords campaign while simultaneously making your advertising more relevant, growing your brand and acquiring more customers.

The second purpose of the article was to get you to say… “Hot diggity!

This makes sense!

I can see how we could be losing ad budget and leads in our company’s AdWords account.

Tell me how you can do this for our company!”

And if that sounds like you…

Here’s Something You’ll REALLY Like!

I’ve opened up a few spots this week to personally talk to you about your SaaS paid customer acquisition efforts.

We’ll look at what paid channels you are currently investing in, what challenges you are currently facing and how you can put a plan in place to turn your failing ad campaigns into profitable winners.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, click here to schedule your “hyper-growth” strategy call.

Lastly, if you got a lot of value from this post, give it a like below 🙂

P.S. In case you’re one of the people (like me) who skim to the P.S. before you read the page, here’s what this is about:

1. 4 steps we took to take 1 SaaS company’s AdWords campaign from dying to 50% month-over-month growth for 6 consecutive months
2. The $10k/month worth of wasted ad spend we found when auditing the Xero and Infusionsoft AdWords accounts
3. A few spots we have open this week for “hyper-growth” strategy calls to give you clarity on how you can turn your failing ad campaigns into profitable winners

Thanks for reading! :) If you enjoyed it, hit that clap button below. Would mean a lot to me and it helps other people see the story.

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