Paid Social Marketing: How To Get High-Quality Leads

The client asked to remain anonymous due to the NDA. Business specifics: selection of outsourcing development teams for specific projects.

We have been working with the company since May 2019. We had to provide 50 high-quality leads per month, and the result was an average of 55 requests per month.

Our client is engaged in the selection of outsourced teams: development teams solve specific business problems of the company’s clients. These may include the development of a website, application, or separate service — with preliminary calculations of project costs and complexity.

We have identified the key conditions. It was important for the customer that requests for cooperation came from foreign clients. To achieve this goal, we set a threshold of at least 50 quality leads each month with a specific budget.

Let’s share how we solved this problem in order not to drain the budget for spam requests.

Before starting working with us, the company had no experience working with advertising campaigns, so we had to do everything «turnkey»:

The first step was to select the «keys» for each audience separately. First, we decided to test the campaigns for the following queries: «web company», «create mobile app», «android mobile development». As a result, we received applications from students and developers who needed development information and relevant documentation. This result did not suit us.

The «web company» query was too general. Such companies deal with a wide range of tasks, and we found that the request is not suitable specifically for our target audience segment — it simply will not be able to get into it specifically.

At the same time, we made another important conclusion: although general queries were not as relevant as possible, they helped solve the additional task of driving traffic to the site. And now we could analyze it and determine the future direction of work.

Analytics systems showed that requests were being received — but most of them turned out to be spam. Only 5 high-quality applications against 103 in general.

By the customer’s decision, we suspended work for three months: our client was redoing the site. The rebranding was aimed at new positioning of the company’s services. If earlier the site had something like «trust us with your project and we will do it», now the presentation was completely different — «Hire our development team for your project».

After a three-month break, we resumed work. It was clear that it was necessary to abandon general requests. We replaced them with more clear ones: in which the client was obviously going to find a contractor.

Examples of such requests:

There is less traffic and its cost has increased. However, since May, many more relevant applications have been appearing.

We’ve already told you how we revised our search queries. After this measure, we updated the overall promotion strategy.

The changes were as follows:

Here it will be correct to highlight the most interesting moments.

The restart reduced the semantics — only a narrow, low-frequency one remained. In other words, the selected target queries were not very comprehensive, and a large amount of traffic could not be generated.

Interestingly, manual selection of queries and their number would also not have yielded results — the ad status would have remained «few impressions».

Autotargeting. We were required to register as relevant ads as possible, and then the system selects them for the most appropriate user requests.

Since the positioning on the customer’s site has changed, we have used several ad variants. It was important to convey the key message — «we are putting together teams for application development».

Dynamic ads in Ads. We’ve added different versions of the text and a lot of headlines. Then Google showed their combinations, and as a result, we got the most relevant and effective options.

Disabling the CMS. At the start of the work, ads were placed on the CMS sites. However, in the future, we identified fraud — many sites bring robots to the site instead of live users. The interesting thing is that robots copied human actions and could even leave a request.

Analytics showed leads with low cost — and equally low quality. As a result, we decided to abandon the Google advertising network.

Here are the results we managed to get:

Keep in mind the specifics of the target audience that you will have to work with. If you know that the users you need are a narrow segment, then you don’t need to artificially expand your reach by using wide-field keys.

What is best to do in this situation: