ROI from Display Ads

ryanrad39

Hi Everyone,

I know this is a subject for debate, but I am curious on the successes that everyone has from Advertising in the platform.

We have been running campaigns (banner ads) for a little over a year now, and have not been able to attribute any pipeline as a result of these campaigns. Initially, we started with the typical TOFU/MOFU/BOFU approach, but have since moved away, as we haven't been able to find a method (other than CRM form fills) that distinguishes where an account is in the buying stage process. We have moved into a single stage approach, where we do specialty campaigns targeting high value accounts, regardless of whether we think they are in market or not.

Has anyone else ran into this? I know form fills are not expected in abundance- but I would have at least figured we would have had at least one in the past year of running these campaigns.. or at least when I have called these companies that clicked on ads (I am also the SDR for our organization), that one would have been in market, but that has not been the case.

Am I looking at this the wrong way? Admittedly, we are a leaner sales & marketing organization with a limited budget, and we have a very sales oriented view of looking at marketing performance. But at the very least, I would have thought that we would have had one attributable deal as a result of these campaigns.

Appreciate any input!

Brandon McBride

There are a few things I want to latch onto here. I don't think they'll directly answer your question, but I'm hoping they'll kick off the conversation in a way that leads us there.

1. You mention that none of the accounts you followed up with were in market. If you don't have the predictive package, @Taylor Matysik may be able to address how you can effectively target without it. Also, I highly recommend reaching out to your CSM, who can either help you directly or connect you to someone who can help.
2. The traditional sales-oriented view of marketing does not help. Sales and Marketing work toward the same goal, but perform very different functions in achieving that goal. Understanding the role each one plays is crucial. Kerry Cunningham's Buyer Experience Report is great at explaining that. There's quite a lot of information there, so if you want a summary I've made, just send me a message here or on LinkedIn.
3. Limited budget is okay. What's great about this tool and this approach is that we can target better, reducing the cost of spend through a highly-targeted approach. Marketing-Sales alignment and agreement on who to target, how to target them, and who handles what is the bigger concern.

Brandon McBride

I'll also add we - we just saw in the Quarterly Product Update that a new advertising dashboard is in the works. It may have additional information to help you understand and explain the impact your ads are having.

ryanrad39

Thanks, @Brandon McBride!

1. Yes, we are not on Predictive, but I am not sure that even if we did have Predictive, it would help. Almost 50% of our opportunities show no form of intent in the platform up to becoming an opportunity in our pipeline. We have over 600 keywords in our instance but we still get a lot of companies that are well into their search process that have no associated key word intent.
2. I understand direct pipeline attribution is an old way of thinking and very sales related. But how do you justify ad spend then to a CFO, when none of it seems to be leading to anything? Is clicking on an ad, especially when I can't see how much time they interacted with my landing page, enough to justify the spend?
3. The great thing is, as the primary user of 6Sense and SDR, the alignment between Sales & Marketing is very strong!😁

I attached a screenshot with how one of our ongoing campaigns to a specific list users that use a technology that would be of high value to what we sell- we have plenty of clicks, and I follow up with an SDR sequence to any company that clicked on an ad (obviously I may not be contacting the person who clicked on the ad). But nothing has come of it yet. Been the story for over a year now.

Brandon McBride

There should be a lot of information around the ERP space. I used to work for SUSE, and our SAP partnership was huge for us.

There's an issue somewhere, but it will take some digging to diagnose what.

If accounts are coming in showing zero research activity and suddenly turning into opportunities, it's safe to say that there's a gap in the keyword strategy, so I'd start there. If you only copied over your list of search keywords, you'll need to make some adjustments.

Long-tail keywords may perform well in paid search, but they usually don't make the best intent keywords because of how they're handled by their respective systems. On the other hand, if your keywords are too generic or overlap with other topics, then you'll just muddy your signals. For example, the last company I was at monitored "change data capture" as well as the industry abbreviation, "CDC", during COVID. When I came in, I had to shut down making decisions off of "CDC" for obvious reasons.

There's an article that explains in more detail here.

Once that's squared away, you can address the campaign. Without the predictive package, you can start by identifying your ICP and narrowing down only on those accounts. Start by building a segment of ICP accounts. Always use that segment as a filter when building any other segments to use for advertising. This will keep you from ever advertising outside of your ICP.

ryanrad39

@Brandon McBride thanks for the input-

I have spent hours without end trying to dig into the keyword issue, and have met with 6Sense's team on this too. We started out with our Google Keywords, but have added hundreds since. I definitely have keywords that are too generic as well, like ERP as a standalone keyword. Being in sales, I can also confirm which competitors our prospects are looking at, and I know for sure I have those competitors as keywords (and variations) in our instance, but they almost never show up on that accounts list of keywords researched.

I initially pushed for the 6Sense platform because of the ability to target ICP companies and weed out companies not a fit for our solution, because we do really have a specific ICP here. I have spent hours fine tuning that segment, and would never advertise to a company that isn't in our ICP; that segment is the foundation of all of our other segments.

Brandon McBride

The other side of that keyword coin is that there may not be a lot of content written about those competitors within the network of websites 6sense has an agreement with.

We run into that where I'm at now, CivicPlus. Our audience is government, not business, so some of our keywords get less traction because 6sense's network is primarily B2B, not B2G.

ryanrad39

@Brandon McBride That's what I am guessing too… these are big companies that are well known, so I can't imagine its a content issue. But I am guessing the buyer journey might be different for our prospects, and they are going right to these competitor websites rather than reading about them, because we are not selling them new technology to their business; they already have ERP systems in place usually and just need to upgrade to a newer version/better one.

charlotte.spangler

You aren't alone for form fills - we don't really have form fills direct from 6sense.

We do have "influenced" form fills, and I'll see companies who are viewing ads then visiting the site later and filling out a form.

But that doesn't really get tied to opportunities.

ryanrad39

@charlotte.spangler thanks- I would be okay with "influenced form fills" too, but we have not had a single one of those either.

There is definitely a gap somewhere, I just don't know what to do at this point.