Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 37 - Leads
Performance Max. Performance Max. No matter where you turn in Google Ads, it's always recommending Performance Max.
For ecommerce businesses, yes, PMax was designed for you.
For local businesses, yes, you can set up PMax for local objectives.
But what about lead generation businesses? Does Performance Max work for lead gen? And can you use value-based bidding? Let's find out.
I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.
This is Inside Google Ads, Episode: 37, Lead Gen.
Our first question comes from Dell on TikTok, and they ask, do you recommend it for lead gen business? This was in response to a video about Performance Max.
Short answer: I do not recommend Performance Max for lead gen business.
Let's get the answer with a little more context now.
Whether Performance Max works well for your business has more to do with you than with PMax. In order for it to work, I’ve found that you need four key things:
Excellent first party audience data, which will inform your bidding and targeting
Compelling ad creative, which you can refresh regularly
Sufficient budget and patience to let the system learn, and
Full-funnel conversion tracking.
Too many lead gen businesses I see do not have number four, full-funnel conversion tracking. So Performance Max doesn't work well because it can drive leads, but it has no visibility into the quality of those leads. You can end up with a lot of low quality leads as a result.
Now, when this happens, people say, “Performance Max doesn't work for lead gen.” And again, it's not that it doesn't work, it's that you're not setting it up for success if you're not giving it the full picture.
It's sort of like plopping someone at the beginning of the race, not telling them where the finish line is, and saying, “Go!” Like, yeah, they can run as fast as they can, but if they don't know where they're supposed to go, they're not going to be able to get there. And then if they manage to find the finish line 3 hours later, you're like, “Oh, that was so slow.” Well, no, you just didn't set them up for success!
Remember, machine learning isn't actually smart. It just takes a lot of data and from that data determines what to do next, so if you don't give it the data it needs from that full-funnel conversion tracking, letting it know which leads end up as customers and which do not, then it's not going to be able to learn and it's not going to be able to drive good results for you.
If you have enhanced conversions and offline conversion tracking implemented and you've tested value-based bidding for lead gen or want to - have at PMax for lead gen. If not, get your foundation in order first, whether or not you're planning to use PMax.
Inside Google Ads is exclusively sponsored by Optmyzr, one of the leading automation PPC management suites to help you run your Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and paid social ads.
Thanks to Optmyzr, I can continue to bring you this podcast for free every week so we can continue to answer your burning Google Ads questions. In preparation for the holiday season, Optmyzr is sharing new data to help you achieve the best results from your ads. For example, Optmyzr found that higher Ad Strength is not correlated with better performance, just like I told you in Episode 11, but higher Optimization Score is correlated with better performance. Really! Maybe you should take a look at those after all?
You can learn more insights like this on the Optmyzr blog at optmyzr.com/blog. That's Optmyzr, O-P-T-M-Y-Z-R.com/blog.
Our second question comes from adwordsnur on Instagram, and they ask, can I use ROAS for a lead campaign? My campaign has enough data and conversion.
Yes, you can. Google calls this value-based bidding or VBB. Gotta love those acronyms.
The way it works is you assign different values to your leads. For example, maybe a lead has a value of 10 and after sales reaches out to them, if they're determined to be a qualified lead, they get a value of 50. And from there, if they turn into a customer, they get a value of 500. I'm just making those numbers up, but you can also make up a scoring system like in that example.
Alternatively, you can use your real revenue numbers and conversion rates to help value-based bidding work. For example, let's say your average revenue per order is $1,000, and let's say that 10% of your leads become customers. Well, 10% of $1,000 is $100, so the value you would assign to a lead is $100. And then if that lead becomes a customer, you would add $900 in value to that lead to recognize the full $1,000 average order value (AOV), or you could put in the actual value that customer had. Maybe some customers are worth $500 and some are worth $5,000 and it just averages out to $1,000, so to start, if someone becomes a lead, you give all leads a value of $100, and if they become a customer, you feed the actual value of that customer to that lead.
Practically, how do we do that? This is done by connecting your CRM system to Google Ads so that you can send those values back and forth. This is what we call offline conversion tracking. Once you have values for leads, whether actual values or scoring system values, you can use Maximize Conversion Value or Target ROAS bidding, and they will look not only at whether they become a lead or not, but which leads bring more value to the business and which bring less value. Then your bid strategy will work to optimize for the total value rather than just total conversions.
Google's guidance says you need at least 15 conversions in 30 days to use value-based bidding. I disagree. While it's possible to work at that lower level, I have seen it happen, you'll usually need at least 30 in 30 (30 conversions in 30 days), and it will work better with at least 90 conversions in 30 days or an average of about 3 conversions a day. It's more data for the system to process because it's not just the binary conversion/no conversion, but all that extra data in there about what influences that higher conversion value.
Google's Ads liaison, Ginny Marvin, did a great short video series on value-based bidding, so I'll link that in the description of this episode if you want to check it out, too, for more information.
Do you want to set up a Performance Max campaign for lead gen, but you're not sure how? All the tutorials out there are focused on things like feeds or local actions. Performance Max for lead gen is one of more than a hundred tutorials in my course, Inside Google Ads. You can learn more learn.jyll.ca, that's j-y-l-l.ca, or simply follow the link in the episode description for Inside Google Ads, the course.
Our next question comes from Papa Rapa on YouTube, and they ask, how to get lead form submitted details.
The lead form asset is one of 12 assets you can add to your Google Ads campaigns, and it gives the option for a lead form to appear alongside your ads within the ad unit itself. You can add lead form assets to Search, Video, Performance Max and Display campaigns.
To get the details that people submit into those lead forms, you can either have them automatically sent to your CRM with a tool like Zapier, or you can use the Google Ads API. This is great if you want to respond to those leads right away, automatically.
Or you can download a CSV, a spreadsheet, from the Google Ads interface to get that lead information. To find them in the interface, go to Assets, select Lead Form, and then you'll see a CSV option.
If you want more tips on Google Ads for lead gen, be sure to check out Episode 6 of this podcast, where we discussed how to prevent spam leads and improve lead quality. And if you want to try Performance Max for your lead gen business, please implement full-funnel conversion tracking first!
Alright, today's Insider Challenge is this. You've been running Search campaigns, Display, Demand Gen, and Video for a lead gen client, and the results are good. You don't have full-funnel conversion tracking implemented, so all Google Ads is seeing is if they were a lead or not. There's no data in Google Ads about the quality - but results have been mostly good. Best with Search, Display is the worst, and then Demand Gen & Video like kind of… pretty low volume, kind of in the middle, low volume. Your client wants you to test Performance Max. They attended a webinar from Google and heard that it's the next greatest thing, and so they say to you, “Why aren't we running Performance Max? Let's run Performance Max.” So what do you do? Do you launch a Performance Max campaign? Do you not?
You can participate by sending me your response to this challenge or any episode's challenge. The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real-life Google Ads problem solving. Shoot me an email at thegooglepro@jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L.ca, or send me a voice note in my Instagram DMs. I'm @the_google_pro on Instagram.
Last episode's challenge was this. How many headlines do you typically like to include in a Responsive Search Ad? You can have up to 15, and you must have at least 3. What's your sweet spot?
Now, I used to be in the “use all available spots” camp, but I changed my mind this year based on the results I was seeing.
You see, the more assets you include in the RSA, the longer it will take to learn since there are so many more combinations of headlines and descriptions to be tested.
Now my sweet spot is 10. I aim for around 10 headlines in an RSA.
What about you? What's your sweet spot?
Shoot me an email at thegooglepro@jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L dot C-A, or send me a voice note in my Instagram DMs. I'm @the_google_pro on Instagram.
I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.