Looming recessions are tough for marketing teams

But we just pulled off some fantastic results for the quarter with our Google Ads.

- 500% increase in Closed Won!

- 70% decrease in Cost per Closed Won!

I've been so busy in the account, working on keywords, ad copy, bidding strategies, and landing pages, I didn't realize how well the quarter was shaping up.

As much as I'd like to share some secret tricks to this success, it's a lot of hard and iterative work. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Used Opteo as an AI assistant to flag any number of issues, big and small

2. Set up ClickCease to deal with all the fraud and bot traffic. Worth every penny!

3. Jumped into SEMrush and studied competitors' strategies. It illuminated some keyword groups we didn't previously have in the account.

4. Spent time listening to Gong calls and talking with the Sales team to glean the keywords our prospects and customers use about Resolve.

5. Put to work just about every ad extension (now called Assets) Google has to offer: images, site links, company name, logo, and callout.

6. Refined the ad copy. With Responsive Search Ads, testing ad copy as before feels impossible. So I focused on getting the Ad Score to at least Good and updating the copy with any lessons learned from landing page tests and Sales conversations.

7. Under Keywords, I checked out the "Search terms" that triggered my ads, sorted by CPC, and excluded anything irrelevant.

8. Reduced the use of 'broad match' keywords, preferring phrase match.

9. About every three months, I went through all the campaigns and pruned any keywords that had yet to result in conversions for at least the last six months. I'd also hunt for new keywords to add to the mix and test.

10. I also switched to a Maximum Value Conversion bidding strategy - not all leads are the same, so providing Google Ads offline conversion data for the most valuable leads was essential. It took a fair bit of work to get all the conversion data set up and working correctly, but so far, it appears to be working well.

11. Oh, and plenty of copy and layout experiments with the landing pages!