“The commitment to our company goals was impressive, even if it meant a shorter-term engagement” – Jamie Scarborough, Founding Partner at Sales Talent Agency

Sales Talent Agency is a Canadian recruitment company that helps their clients build elite go-to-market teams, whether they are looking to find one key sales role or staff an entire sales team. They get it done the right way, the first time, and maintain one of the lowest replacement rates in the industry at 3%.

LEAN partnered with Sales Talent Agency to help them optimize and scale their B2B side of the business.

Project #1: Customizing the landing page for the B2B audience

Issue: You may have the best keywords, traffic, and most compelling ad copy, but if your on-site experience isn’t tailored to the user journey, you will lose people on the website. Sales Talent Agency functions as both a recruitment agency and a job board. Their B2B page contained a navigation menu which included a “Search Jobs” button leading people to the B2C-oriented job board, and also featured a “Call us today” as a secondary CTA that didn’t align with typical B2B user behavior (companies want a meeting in their calendar, not to just call another company).

We analyzed historical user flow data and saw that although this page had a lot of interaction with the “Search Jobs” and “Call us today” buttons, there was never a Customer that came through those flows.

Solution: We designed a new SEM-specific landing page in a lightweight and fast-launch format, since we wanted to get some insights and gather data before the client makes a bigger investment into a full re-design. The new page featured a few simple modifications:

• A singular, clear CTA.
• Removed top navigation bar to reduce click-aways.
• Headline that communicates a clear value prop and direct benefit to the user.
• A stock background image that visually communicated a more business setting.
• Trust elements added as a few short bullet points above the fold.
• Rotating logos of companies they’ve worked with.

Project #2: Further refining the Landing Page experience

Issue: As a part of the landing page testing process, we introduced a heatmaps tool which helped us uncover another weak point in the landing page experience – the proactive Chat Bot. Looking at both the desktop and mobile recordings of the homepage, there were obvious hotspots on the “x” command indicating that people disliked the chat bot and were closing it.

In addition, the chat bot was following the same Lead generating flow as the old page, leading people to the Job Board if they said they were “looking for a job”; or asking for their email if they said they’re “looking to hire”.

Solution: We wanted to understand more about the chat bot interactions, and see whether it may be driving quality leads. So, we dug into the previous 1 year of chat bot data to uncover the following:

• 75% of chat bot interactions were people looking for a job (aka not B2B)
• 20% were looking to hire, but didn’t provide an email address (aka not leads)
• 5% were looking to hire and provided an email address (BUT 3.5% had a gmail, yahoo, outlook email address, again indicating that they are not high-quality B2B type of leads)

The final suggestion was that the chat bot, in its current form, needed to be removed from the website because it’s driving a lot of B2C interactions as well as “junk” leads when it comes to the B2B segment of the business which Sales Talent Agency wanted to grow. 

Project #3: Scaling, but with the right company type

Issue: We didn’t have issues when it came to scaling… (just look at the chart below)

…but, the issues arose while closely monitoring the lead quality. There were increasingly more Leads coming from small Companies, or Companies looking to hire commission-only sales people that didn’t have a guaranteed annual salary, all of which would be considered a low quality lead for Sales Talent Agency. 

Solution: We didn’t want to continue scaling Leads for just volume over quality. We needed to teach Google’s algorithm who’s the right kind of lead for us. Previously within Google ads, we had one event that tracked conversions whenever someone successfully filled out the lead form following the “Hire a sales person” CTA button, and it didn’t matter who filled out that form.

So, we worked with Sales Talent Agency’s developer team to engineer a dual flow that would indicate the Lead quality, and enable us to only train Google’s algorithm to optimize on the higher quality leads. Here’s the logic of how the flows were constructed:

Project #4: Sorting out the business-level backend data

Issue: This was one of our first focus areas when we started working with Sales Talent Agency. We asked for access to the backend data from the client to understand the cross-channel mix, and what each initiative is driving for the business. 

What we found was that there was one lumped group called simply Google which was driving the majority of the revenue for the business. The problem was that this group didn’t distinguish between google organic, google paid traffic, or direct traffic as separate sources.

Solution: The solution was as simple as a walk in the park. We needed UTM parameters to append to the paid ads URLs and the client was going to be able to tell apart the two channels in the backend.

The real result for LEAN was a happy client who praised us for being focused on the bottom-line of their business, and that we ultimately left their business in better condition than we found it. For comparison, there was another agency that was previously managing their campaigns for over two years and never thought to dig just a little bit under the surface to find tons of opportunities that can improve the business.

That’s why 100% of LEAN’s clients come from recommendations.

Client Overview

Bloomscape delivers fully-grown, ready-to-go plants to customer’s doors. In short, everything you’ll ever need as a plant parent & greenery lover.

We talked more about this awesome brand in one of our previous posts (see here), and this time around, we wanted to take a look at something that is not very common among Meta advertisers: An ad that has not been paused since November 2019 – that’s 3 years! Or in PPC years, that’s probably around 55890 millennia.

So, let’s see why and how this ad is still running.

Creative Approach & Solution

The main idea is – hit the right audience with the right ad, at the right time. Nothing you haven’t already heard, right?

Knowing that we have a lot of different products and a lot of users who are just screen shopping, we wanted to find a way to remind them to take the next step towards getting ‘em beautiful leafy friends.

The solution? A simple remarketing dynamic product carousel ad, targeting cart abandoners.

It’s nothing we haven’t seen other brands doing all the time, but this was the ad that immediately came out with all guns blazing.

And here’s the breakdown:

Pretty simple, right?

The results?

It’s probably best to show you.

Since the ad was first launched (November 2019), we can see the immediate ROAS spike. This is definitely expected for a Remarketing ad, but especially for the period from April to December, the average ROAS is much higher compared to all the other ads.

But, what’s also obvious is that the ROAS line follows the overall Remarketing ROAS trend, and interestingly enough, the ROAS of this ad drops mid 2021 and after that is more or less the same with the other Remarketing ads.

In the end, this ad had 97% higher average ROAS compared to the other ads and 34% higher compared to the other Remarketing ads.

“But what about the CTR?” you may ask, my fellow click-loving friend. Well, not too shabby.

On average, this ad had 70% higher CTR compared to the other ads and 30% higher CTR compared to the other Remarketing ads. And unlike the ROAS trend, this ad still had one of the highest CTRs in the account.

Conclusion

Does this mean that this ad will live on forever? Well, probably not, but who knows? Looking at the CTR, we know that this ad is still pretty relevant and engaging. But looking at the ROAS, there might be a few things that can be done to further improve it.

In addition, let’s not forget that the ad performance also depends on a lot of different factors such as: offer, products available, quality of the prospecting audience that we’re getting into the funnel and so on.

Nevertheless, reaching the right audience with the right ad is still pretty relevant. And Meta’s algorithm is allowing advertisers to hit the bull’s-eye.

Until next time, we encourage you to think about the ways you can reach your audience with the right ad. It might not live forever, but you’ll definitely learn a lot along the way.

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Want our amazing creative team to create your next “Keith Richards ad”? Check out our creative portfolio and reach out.

If you’re still wondering whether Performance Max campaigns can bring real results for you business, the answer is – 100% yes. And here’s our proof.

Our client Dialpad faced challenges in driving revenue through their customer acquisition strategy with Google. However, we leveraged Google’s Performance Max to deliver an additional 18% revenue, making this campaign a core part of their marketing strategy.

In this official case study by Google, we explore the approach, results, and the role of LeanSEM’s expertise in Dialpad’s success with Performance Max.

Performance Max helped us leverage all Google channels in a very simple way under a single campaign, helping us get nearly 20% more new paying customers for Dialpad.

– Morgan Norman, CMO, Dialpad

The Challenge

Dialpad is an industry-leading AI-powered cloud communications platform that was facing challenges driving additional revenue with its customer acquisition strategy with Google. It wanted to increase the volume of high-quality free trials that led to paid Dialpad customers. 

The Approach

Dialpad turned to Performance Max, using free trials as the conversion event. For Dialpad, trial signups are high volume, but also correlate well with buying intent, with a typically strong customer conversion rate. The cloud company was then able to leverage existing creative assets from other campaigns to quickly build and launch its Performance Max campaign, enabling them to maximize their reach across Search, Display, Video, Gmail, and the Discover feed.

Partnering with LeanSEM: LeanSEM helped Dialpad use paid customer lists as audience signals and tailor its value propositions for ad copy and creative, and use final URL expansion targeting for landing pages to find additional search queries likely to convert.

The Results

Prior to Performance Max, Dialpad was managing more than 30 campaigns across Search, YouTube, and Display. Since launching Performance Max, Dialpad has experienced improvements in both the quality and volume of net new free trials coming through Google Ads. Dialpad was able to uncover a completely new keyword theme with the Performance Max landing page insights report, which contributed to Performance Max delivering an additional 18% in revenue, 17% more Dialpad customer conversions, and 26% increase in trial signups. As a result, Dialpad made Performance Max a permanent part of its marketing strategy. 

Source: Official Case Study by Google

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