Conversion Events and B2B Advertising
As a B2B marketer, you want your advertising to drive qualified new prospects with intent to close into your funnel.
How do you know if new leads or sign-ups are qualified? In truth, you don’t know for sure until they become a paying customer.
But there are *signals* at every stage of the process that hints at how qualified and intent-filled the prospects are. We can call these signals Leading Indicators of Future Earnings (LIFE).
Conversion Events are the way to quantitatively measure these quality and intent signals. In many cases, conversion events have a bigger impact on lead quality than the actual targeting you use on the platforms.
How do conversion events increase lead quality?
Conversion events can be almost anything that happens on your site (or on the ad platform). Someone clicked a button. Or filled out a leadform. Or filled out the leadform in a way that shows they’re a big lead. Or they completed step 4/10 in your free trial. Any of these can be a conversion event.
For a fuller understanding of all the types of conversion events you can create in your form and sign-up flow, read more on how to optimize forms and sign-up flows
Once you decide on your Conversion Events, you can send a record of these events happening to the ad platforms, via pixels or API. This accomplishes two things:
Your team can make better manual decisions in your ad accounts.. I.E. AdWords shows you that Campaign A had 4 qualified lead form fills and Campaign B had 10, so your team decides to pause campaign A.
The ad platform AIs can make better automated decisions in your ad accounts. Good signals enable the ad platforms can go find more users who look and act like ones that converted on your site. I.E. Facebook takes data on which kind of users fired quality signals on your site, and uses that to find more of those kind of people on the Facebook platform
The 3 Rules of Conversion Events:
There’s three rules for making effective conversion signals in B2B:
You need at least 30 conversions per week per ad-set for ad platform algorithms to optimize properly. Each conversion event can’t be too rare. Your job is to balance quality of signal with quantity.
The signal you use has to correlate to future revenue. If “leads” or “sign-ups” has too much quality variation to reliably correlate to revenue at some point in the future, it is not a great signal to learn from. You’ll need to add another qualifier like, “number of employees” or “revenue”
It’s best if the conversion signal happens within 24 hours of the user clicking the ad. This helps the ad platforms learn effectively.
This is the capstone of modern advertising, and choosing the right conversion events is more important in B2B than anywhere else.
Case Study on Conversion Events
Below is a case study illustrating just how big of a difference the right conversion event can make. In both sides of the test, the only change was conversion event. By optimizing further downfunnel, the client was able to dramatically improve lead quality.
How To Implement Conversion Events
This section is a not a step by step guide (there are many out there), but rather a high level look at how companies implement events in different ways.
There are three ways to send conversion event data to ad platforms:
Standard - Pixel Based
The best tool for creating pixel based conversion events that you can send to the platforms is Google Tag Manager. There’s a number of other tools such as Tealium and Segment that can also send pixel conversion events, but GTM is powerful and versatile.
At Right Percent, we first work with the clients to identify all the areas in the form and sign-up flow that could signal quality. Then we’ll have a Google Tag Manager expert create separate events for each event, and send them to the platforms.
Generally, you can’t send too much data to the platforms and should err on creating more events. This will help you find correlations in the future.
2. On Platform
Another way is to use on platform conversion events, such as Facebook and LinkedIn Native Lead Ads. With these tools, users can sign-up right on the platform.
In this case, you can measure quality based on questions leads gave on answers in the leadform. This data is available as both Excel exports from the platforms, as well as in your CRM where the leads are being sent. You don’t need anything technical like Google Tag Manager to send data since this data already exists in the ad platforms.
The big advantage to on-platform lead collection is perfect tracking, as you always know exactly the campaign and ad a lead came from.
3. Server to Server
Some signals that leads generate are not possible to pull in from the public website or the ad platform. This includes conversion events that happens in the sales process (sales qualifies the lead, etc) or events that happen deep in your product as opposed to the public website. These kinds of conversions are often called Offline Conversions, Server to Server Conversions, or API conversions.
Generally, there’s three ways to connect your back-end data to the ad platforms.
You can use a tool like Zapier. This is flexible and versatile, and you don’t need a developer. However, many companies find they outgrow Zapier once they have a robust internal marketing data set-up.
You can use a tool like Segment or Singular. These tools generally require a developer to get the most out of, but it saves them time compared to manually creating an API connection to the ad platforms.
Lastly, a developer can build a custom API connection to the platforms. We don’t recommend this approach - it takes a lot of developer hours and needs to be maintained constantly as the platform APIs are constantly changing.
Backend data can be very powerful, but the same rules apply to it - you need to be tracking 30+ conversions per ad-set for it to be effective. There is no downside to sending in any back-end data you think could be applicable, and we recommend it once you have the internal resources to do it.