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Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is further optimizing your channels in terms of where you’re getting the leads for your B2B SaaS. Now, in this case, for me, this is through search ads, so I am primarily getting the traffic for people that I’m trying to drive into my B2B SaaS from Google search ads.
Now, when I was beginning, and I always encourage this, I was moving pretty fast, so I set up a campaign. Essentially as quickly as I could, cuz I was doing a number of things simultaneously, like putting up the landing page, potentially working on the prototype, measuring how effectively I was converting people.
I was doing a lot. So cuz I was moving quickly, I just set up essentially the basics for the early campaign in order to run my early stage experiment to get a better idea in terms of how many prospects I was ultimately gonna be able to convert. Now. After I ran that experiment and I got the data back, which said how many folks I was ultimately able to convert and then sign off on essentially the early stage economic viability of the B2B SaaS that I was talking about building.
Then I had the information I needed in order to move forward with the build. So the build is done, the product is live. Now I’m trying to focus on converting people. Using the products to paint for the product. So that is the spot that I’m at at the moment with what I’m building. Now, in order to do that, I’ve already talked a little bit about further optimizing whatever channel you are using in order to ultimately get to and through this stage, which again, for me is via search ads now, because I had just set that up via the basics in the.
I, it was definitely not optimized, so I’ve recently gone back in there to dive in. I’ve been monitoring it, but I haven’t done a deep dive. I recently did a deep dive and I learned quite a bit. As in number one, I’m expecting to kind of hit the throttle on trying to get as much activity from that channel as possible.
Number two, the channel is definitely not optimized because as I was looking at the details, what I saw was very different Click through rates. Depending upon what was being shown, where it was being shown, when it was being shown a number of different variables. So I wanna explain to you what a few of those were for me and the changes that I’m making based on the results that I’ve observed now, because I just kind of did things quick and dirty in the beginning.
Through Google it ultimately set it up with our quote unquote like smart campaign, which I would definitely encourage you to avoid because it is severely limiting in terms of what it is you can control, and that’s the problem I was running into. I went in there and I was trying to make customizations to optimize my campaign and I really couldn’t because it was started with that so-called smart campaign, which is I think essentially just meant.
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Folks to get through the process as quick as possible. I’m trying to automate stuff for you, but it limits you in terms of what you can do. So you’re very limited in terms of the modifications you can make, and that’s the problem I was running into. So ultimately I replaced this campaign, but when I was evaluating the performance of it, I noticed a couple things.
Number one, Where they were displaying the ads, they were displaying them in a bunch of different locations. One of those was Google display ads, which is not what I wanted. Uh, that is like, I think blogs and stuff like that, if people place ads around there, so like you may have seen like a banner ad or something like that.
That’s not what I’m looking for. So actually quite a bit of my budget was going to that. I simply, My budget going to search ads when people are searching with Google search engine and they’re seeing the results, I want them to see mine at the top. So I wanted to modify that in that I wanted to remove the display ad component.
Another thing that I noticed was that a significant amount of my ad budget was going towards mobile applications, or mobile devices, I should say, as in when people were searching via Google, but they were doing so from their mobile. My application, though it is responsive, it’s not really designed for someone to be using it via mobile phone.
All right? We’re talking about, you know, a podcasting assistant, so to speak. You’re moving files around, you’re doing editings, that type of stuff. Most people are not doing heavy editing like that from their phone. They’re doing it from their desktop. And this was even more obvious when I looked at the clickthrough rate and the conversions from desktop versus mobile, despite the fact that quite a bit of my budget was going through, uh, mobile platform.
Going to mobile platforms. The majority, the highest clickthrough rate was from desktops, which is essentially what I was expecting it to be. So long story short there too, I also removed the budget going towards mobile devices. I don’t want to go through mobile devices, so no display ads, no mobile devices.
I wanted it to go just through Google search, and I wanted to just be displayed for folks that are browsing via desktop. So with just those two changes, I’m expecting to see some improvements, and I’ll keep you posted of course, but I wanted to share with. What the process of further optimizing looks like and share with you some tips if you’re gonna be using search or ads or anything like that in terms of trying to generate traffic in that too.
You know, unless you want to do, like I did a quick and dirty very early campaign, probably avoid setting it up via Smart Campaign through Google and instead give yourself access to some of those more advanced tools, cuz that’ll help you with when you’re ready to do further customizations.