Our client iDoklad is a well-known Czech online service for simple invoicing. Now, we have taken our long and successful collaboration even further – in this article, we will show you how we transformed their campaigns into a literal machine for generating qualified leads.
iDoklad is a well-known Czech online service for simple invoicing and one of the biggest players in its field on the Czech and Slovak market. Over the years of our cooperation, we have had countless well-functioning campaigns and solid results. But as with all our clients, we are also trying to always find ways to take their digital marketing to ever higher levels.
iDokllad’s PPC strategy has historically been based on getting as many user registrations as possible. Internally, however, the client is also evaluating other parts of the conversion funnel, in this case the active use of the app as well as the final conversion to a paying customer.
Here we identified potential for improvement and decided to integrate more advanced parts of the funnel into the campaigns. The logical step was to focus on the very next stage – qualified leads (MQLs), or users who have already issued their first invoice. This is because MQL data is of much more value to the client than registrations alone.
Deciding which solution to use was mainly influenced by the fact that the client’s campaigns run on both Google and Bing. We had also previously implemented Display & Video 360 (DV360) for RTB and display advertising. Therefore, our eyes quickly fell on a “sister” platform – Search Ads 360.
In short, Search Ads is a “superstructure” of the original PPC platforms, not replacing them, but complementing them, covering them with a common analytics solution and integrating bidding under one roof.
For our case, the following possibilities were particularly key:
Based on these features, we built a case for iDocument and started testing it.
Campaigns for iDoklad were facing two big changes: integrating them into SA360 and changing the optimization from registrations to MQL.
The integration itself is relatively straightforward. Once an account is created in SA360, two-way data syncing between SA360 and PPC accounts in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads begins to work.
On top of the connected platforms, SA360 builds custom bidding strategies that work with the integrated data. One of the (many) effects is that campaign results in Microsoft Ads serve as signals for Google Ads and vice versa. The system learns from both of the platforms and improves the performance of all the campaigns.
The question was how to make the most of these effects. To optimize, we first tried setting up a combination of free registrations and MQLs for the target ROAS, where conversion values were set “artificially” – according to the transition ratios in the funnel. Usually with our clients, we have good experiences with this solution.
However, in our testing we were unable to compare SA360’s performance with the original Google Ads bidding. While the number of MQLs has increased, the cost has also increased disproportionately, thus increasing the CPA. Therefore, we couldn’t compare the results well enough.
Since the main goal of the experiment was to increase the number of users further down the conversion funnel, we abandoned the ROAS strategy and switched to pure MQL optimization.
After switching to the new targets, the performance of SA360 began to improve rapidly. Comparing with Google Ads over the past few months, we can see that the SA360 bid strategy can get far more qualified leads at a comparable or even lower CPA.
Over the past 3 months, we have 21% more MQLs on SA360’s tracked campaigns, and the CPA is 5% lower compared to Google Ads. We have also seen a significantly higher transition ratio between signups and MQLs.
Based on this, we rated the implementation of SA360 at iDoclad as a success. We are including more and more campaigns in the experiment over time, which further validates the results.
To summarize – what are the most important things we took away from the implementation process?
If you liked this snippet of how SA360 can help you with campaigns, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We would be happy to analyze your current situation and suggest a strategy to get the most out of your campaigns – just like we did with iDoklad.
