How One Operational Audit and Task Management SaaS Drove More Leads for Less with Google PMax Ads
Type of SaaS
Audit and Task Management SaaS
Verticals
Restaurants, Convenience Stores, Grocery Stores
Services Provided
PPC Marketing Strategy and Google PMax Ads Launch
The Company
The B2B SaaS is a leading cloud-based operational audit and task management provider. Their platform empowers multi-location teams to deliver consistent service, protect brand standards, and streamline the execution of routine tasks across brick-and-mortar stores. Used primarily by businesses like restaurants and convenience stores, the client builds customer loyalty and drives revenue by giving regional leaders real-time insight into performance across all locations.
The Challenge
When leadership changed after an acquisition, the new management team maintained a pre-acquisition goal of more than 700 marketing qualified leads per quarter on a relatively low budget of less than $2,500 per month across all ad channels.
Facing a limited budget, an anticipated increase in the MQL goal and an expectation to swiftly deliver more qualified leads who would eventually become sales-ready, we had our work cut out for us.
Familiar with the client after years of driving success for the old team, Bay Leaf Digital Director of Strategy and Growth Marketing Ashley Monismith spearheaded our efforts. She says, “I knew that achieving the client’s goals would be difficult but, with a combination of creativity and data-driven strategies, it wouldn’t be impossible. My team was up for the challenge.”
We began by applying approximately half of the budget toward traditional Google Ads campaigns and saw some early success. Initially, leads were coming in via Google search campaigns, but at approximately $24 per conversion, the cost per lead (CPL) was quite high for the budget. We needed a way to lower CPL while increasing the quantity and maintaining the quality of the leads. Experience, research, and campaign data convinced us that trading traditional Google search ads for the platform’s innovative Performance Max (PMax) campaigns was the way to go.
The Solution
Unlike traditional search campaigns that serve ads on search engine results pages, Google PMax leverages the platform’s AI to create a single, goal-based campaign that runs across all Google-owned channels including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. There are some limitations when using PMax; visibility into performance is incomplete, reporting capabilities are less than what’s available in standard search and display campaigns, and relinquishing some control is necessary. That said, advertisers can still apply detailed targeting through keywords, customer match lists, retargeting and/or demographic details as defined by Google. PMax is a cost-effective way for SaaS marketers to tap into Google’s full ecosystem, even if much of the optimization happens behind the curtain.
We quickly switched the primary focus of our marketing efforts from search-only to PMax and applied a few post-ad click optimizations on the client’s website, including:
Leveraging content and keywords that had performed well for our search-only campaigns.
Adding audience attributes that matched high quality leads and existing customers in the client’s CRM.
Optimizing the client's website with forms that would elicit more lead qualifying information (company name, company email) and automatically qualify leads.
The Results
Changing our focus to Google PMax lowered PPC-based CPLs by 2.5X and tripled the quality of leads in comparison to the results we were able to generate using traditional search campaigns.
Cost per conversion dropped below $10. Where our search-only campaigns automatically qualified 6% of leads, the PMax campaigns increased that figure to 18%. A substantial number of those leads came from nationally recognized restaurant chains and big-budget hospitality brands.
Thanks in part to our marketing efforts, the client has filled its funnel with contacts to nurture into qualified leads and, in time, new customers. The company is well positioned to dominate and scale post-acquisition, driving profits and pleasing investors.
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