Digital Profits Podcast – Episode 6: Hitting CPA Goals vs. Hitting MQL Goals in PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has become a critical aspect of generating leads for businesses in various niches. While achieving a lower cost per acquisition (CPA) is essential for businesses operating on a limited budget, it is equally important to focus on generating marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) in your PPC advertising campaign, rather than just conversions alone.
However, focusing exclusively on efficiency and CPA goals may not always be the best approach. Marketers who solely optimize for CPA goals are at risk of missing out on significant revenue opportunities. In other words, optimizing solely for CPA may lead to a false sense of security, as potential volumes of customers could still be un-acquired.
To avoid this, it is essential to incorporate data connectors to your marketing strategy, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, which are crucial for understanding the down-funnel, improving lead qualification, and creating a more effective PPC strategy. Through data connectors, marketers can better assess the quality of their leads, adjust their strategy to optimize for MQLs, and increase their ROI (return on investment) in the long run.
Optimizing solely for CPA goals may also lead to sacrificing significant growth opportunities in the future by choking off the funnel. This happens when marketers limit testing and optimize for only one goal. Consequently, this approach does not allow for experimentation or finding new potential channels, potentially limiting a business’s growth potential.
To avoid sacrificing future growth potential, it is important to balance efficiency and growth by experimenting with various approaches to optimize for MQLs effectively. This balance is a critical component in creating an effective PPC advertising campaign that generates both qualified leads and long-term growth. By focusing on MQLs, a company ensures that it is attracting high-quality leads that are more likely to convert, which in turn leads to long-term growth potential.
The conversion path that is defined and optimized also plays a vital role in a successful PPC campaign. To achieve higher quality leads, it is essential to understand different types of conversions such as calls, form submissions, chats, newsletter signups, e-commerce, and demos and optimize campaigns for the right objectives. This approach helps marketers to optimize for conversions that are further down the funnel and helps to engage with highly qualified leads.
In conclusion, striking a balance between efficiency and growth while optimizing for MQLs should be the focus of PPC advertising campaigns. The following are some guidelines to ensure that businesses are on the right track to look towards MQL optimization.
Investing in better Data Connectors
To optimize your PPC advertising campaign for MQLs, you need to incorporate data connectors such as HubSpot or Salesforce into your marketing strategy. These platforms enable marketers to better assess the quality of their leads and adjust their strategy to optimize for MQLs. By using these tools, marketers can keep track of user engagement, which channels are bringing the highest quality leads, and ultimately optimize for long-term success.
Balancing Efficiency and Growth in Optimization
To avoid sacrificing the future growth potential of your business, it is essential to strike a balance between efficiency and growth. While optimizing exclusively for CPA may lead to better cost-effectiveness in the short term, it can also have negative long-term impacts.
To optimize for long-term growth while still maintaining cost-effectiveness, businesses need to experiment with various approaches to generate MQLs. One good way is to run A/B testing, which involves testing multiple versions of different elements of your PPC ads to determine what works best and ultimately selecting the optimal version. Additionally, it is important to keep track of the results of various PPC campaigns to help understand what works and what doesn’t.
Optimizing for Appropriate Conversion Goals and Objectives
It’s essential to optimize your PPC campaign for appropriate conversion goals and objectives. While calls, form submissions, and chats are all important, the right conversion objective needs to be selected to ensure higher-quality leads. For instance, if an organization is at its maximum capacity and has no more room for clients, they may want to focus on chat conversions as they take longer to close than phone calls.
Tracking Conversion Paths
Tracking all three conversion paths (online, offline, and call tracking) is essential. This information helps businesses understand their customer journeys and know what paths to conversion users take. It also helps avoid cutting off campaigns based on high CPA data alone, which may be misleading. By understanding the customer journey to make more informed decisions, businesses can ensure they are making data-driven decisions to optimize their campaigns better.
Closing the Loop Between Marketing and Business Outcomes
Closing the loop between marketing and business outcomes is the ultimate goal of any PPC campaign. This requires the integration of marketing and sales data to connect marketing metrics with business operational numbers in real-time. This helps to create more responsive marketing campaigns that can drive key business outcomes, ultimately achieving the marketing goals and KPIs. By aligning incentives for all stakeholders, businesses can ensure they are growing in the same direction, rather than focusing solely on metrics like cost
In our most recent episode of the Digital Profits Podcast, EP 6: Maximizing ROI in PPC Campaigns, we further explore the concept of generating MQLs in PPC advertising campaigns. We cover various topics, such as the importance of data connectors, balancing efficiency and growth, optimizing for appropriate conversion goals and objectives, tracking conversion paths, and more. Tune in to learn more and take your business to the next level of growth.
Welcome to the Digital Profits Podcast, where you’ll learn how to grow your business faster using paid traffic and SEO. Each episode will feature a breakdown of digital marketing trends and answers to your burning questions that will provide actionable takeaways to make your marketing better. So join us Ben Page, Ray Sawvell, and Blake John, as we guide you on your journey to higher profits. Remember to join the Profit squad @joinprofitsquad.com and get ready to profit in 3, 2, 1.
Ben Page: Ben here, and I’m joined today by the one and only pay per click phenomenal YouTube All Star, Ray Sawvell, hello.
Ray Sawvell: Thank you, Ben, for the Kind intro.
Ben Page: We are jazzed up lots of caffeine today and we’re talking about a really important topic in PPC, which is hitting CPA goals versus hitting MQL goals. A juicy one I know well, into quickly defined terms here so we don’t lose everyone in the first 9 seconds of the podcast. CPA, cost per acquisition, sometimes called cost per conversion, and MQL, marketing qualified leads. So going beyond that conversion, one step deeper. Step deeper. Only qualified once. So guys, we are B2C lead generation search engine marketers and going to guide you through this discussion today. And let’s start, Ray with this. What are the greatest risks of hitting your CPA goal consistently? That false sense of security, you’re crushing it. Take it away. What do you think?
Ray Sawvell: I would love to. The biggest thing that I tend to think of is you’re optimizing for efficiency versus growth. So the numbers that the platforms give you might be lying. They may not be telling you the entire story. So a good example here is you could be leaving revenue on the table. So Google Ads might be giving you one number where you’re getting a ton of conversions. Whether that’s a form fill if you’re a lead gen business or E-com. But obviously we’re talking about legion. So you may be optimizing for as just many conversions as possible versus qualified ones. That’s why you need some type of data connector, which we’ll be talking about here later. So things like Salesforce or HubSpot to really understand down funnel, what those marketing qualified leads look like. So when I tend to think about risk, that’s probably the biggest one. You’re not comparing apples to apples because you’re just looking at the amount of total leads coming in versus qualified ones
.
Ben Page: That’s so interesting for me. I tend to think in terms of frameworks and models. And so I’m thinking about this through the lens of a negative feedback loop where imagine you’re working with an agency, you’re running Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, whatever, and every single month they’re coming back and saying, great news, we cut your CPA. It’s down 10%. It’s down 10%. It’s down 10%. Maybe you’re getting a similar volume, maybe a slight lift in total conversions or leads, maybe they’re down a little bit. But hey, the efficiency is great. And we need to cut some marketing budgets so it sounds good and so it can create this negative feedback loop where there’s downward pressure on the cost per acquisition that is maybe needless. Because if there’s opportunity to acquire more customers or somewhere in that range of CPA. But you keep going. Now, you’re cutting off a ton of potential volume that you didn’t need to.
Ray Sawvell: And you’re in trouble.
Ben Page: And you’re in trouble. I mean, you are from a growth perspective or even a replacing churn perspective. Yeah, that’s so interesting.
Ray Sawvell: Can I give like a real life example here that is maybe a little bit of a horror story? And I would encourage the listeners to maybe go check this out themselves if this rings true with them. So year and a half ago or so, Performance Max was introduced. And what that is, it’s all of Google’s Ads inventory in one campaign. It’s got search, shopping, video, display, all that good kind of stuff in one campaign type. Now, the reason why this is so important, why optimizing for MQLs versus actual conversions, and it kind of goes against all the points that you were just talking about, is the platform may be telling you that you’re winning, you’re winning, you’re winning, but it’s optimizing for junk. It’s optimizing for the example that we had here is we had a client who was optimizing for chats. So like a softer conversion, but P.max or Performance Max was optimizing for just low quality chats, which were most likely bot traffic instead of optimizing for phone calls or form fills, things that were slightly more qualified. And these platforms were reporting that they were winning when in reality, it was just garbage. So cost per conversion was looking good, but in reality, cost per Admin or MQLs were really hurting.
Ben Page: Yeah.
Ben Page: And so there’s a huge delta between did it convert and was that an MQL? We’ll talk about that later. Thinking about that ratio. But yeah, just the idea of quality. I mean, I think that brings in a question within PPC, you’re thinking about what’s your campaign optimization objective? And if you can optimize towards something further down in the funnel, if there’s enough volume to do that, you should do that. But back to the idea of efficiency versus growth. It’s like you’re always kind of trading off volume and efficiency. That’s how I think of it. And this idea of the marginal conversion, right. I think the way we’re actually going to have a whole other episode about this, and I think we’ve done some recent LinkedIn posts on the company page about the golden metrics in Legion. But the whole idea is if you truly understand lifetime value for a patient, for a customer, or at least maybe a good fallback, if you don’t have great data yet, would be like average revenue per year per user or something like that, right. Then you can, based on your goals in the organization, your financial goals and kind of the economic engine of the business and the payback periods and so on, you can sort of back out what’s an acceptable CPA. And if you know that at the outset too, that will kind of be your hedge against continuously optimizing for low cost conversions. But sacrificing growth. Yeah, it’s like, well, great, maybe you are crushing it in Search and you cut your CPA in half or something, but, hey, can we take some of that incremental dollars and start testing a new channel? Like, oh, we opened up Display and it’s converted. The CPA is a little bit higher. It’s 30% higher or something than Search, but we’re getting all this incremental qualified leads if you have the right tracking in place. Right?
Ray Sawvell: Yeah. And like to zoom in just a little bit more. There, like a major risk of really optimizing towards CPA is you’re not able to test as much because you’re sort of locked into a box, and you’re only able to optimize for this one goal. Let’s say my CPA goal is $100. Well, that may limit some of the testing that you may want to do midfunnel or up funnel that are going to have significantly different CPA goals. So that’s definitely a downside. It just kind of locks you into what you’re doing and doesn’t allow you to experiment as much.
Ben Page: Yeah, it’s like the idea of having always having a testing budget and the concept of if you’re beginning a new channel or a new campaign type, having some learning budget in there because it might like in the case if you’re using smart bidding, if you have enough events happening, enough conversion events happening where machine learning can actually function effectively, then having enough sort of padding or budget in there to allow for that learning to take place is super important. So all right, well, those are some of the greatest risks.
Ben Page: Right.
Ben Page: If you’re just myopically focused on efficiency, CPA. CPA it’s like, well, if you’re not looking at lead quality, fail. If you’re not balancing efficiency and growth, probably fail. There might be a season of cutting and efficiency and so on.
Ray Sawvell: You might look really good now, but you’re sacrificing growth in the future because you’re kind of like you’re only choking off of the funnel.
Ben Page: Yeah, it’s like you’re choking your funnel. You’re choking off your future potential.
Ray Sawvell: Future. You will. Thank you.
Ben Page: Yeah, that’s a good point.
Ben Page: Yeah.
Ben Page: And so this idea of kind of building on that, so what you count as a conversion matters. Blake and I were just talking about this with three different conversion paths on a client’s website where they have calls, they have a form submission, and they have a chat. We see this all the time. Oh, there’s a newsletter sign up. There’s a webinar or something, and then there’s a purchase or ecommerce. Like, maybe there’s a demo or get on a sales call kind of thing. So having these different kinds of conversions defined and optimizing different campaigns for the right objectives and maybe testing there is important. Why do you think that is so important, Ray?
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, because understanding that marketing qualified close rate by conversion action is just so important. So the example that I was discussing earlier, chat to marketing qualified rate in this client example that we were discussing might be around like 10% or so where somebody filling out a form on a website or filling out or calling the business has a slightly higher around like 30% to 40%. So not saying that all chats are bad in this example, but you’re likely going to either want to allocate more budget to the form fill campaigns that I’m mentioning or the phone call optimizations, or you want to find different campaign types in this example, in PPC for example, that have higher close rates for chat. So that’s one of the major reasons why understanding marketing qualified leads is so important because then you’re able to find exactly which conversion action is working best and then push your budget towards those campaign types.
Ben Page: Yeah, I think a lot about engineering the buy is how I think about it. So what you’re saying, Ray, is like, hey, if you have multiple conversion paths, probably they’re going to have different CPAs in terms of performance or cost per conversions. But if you have one that is like your lights out, yeah, high MQL percent and they always go down funnel and a high SQL percent or high close rate, you want to make sure you’ve got max dollars flowing through that conversion path. Do that first before you start experimenting? But in my mind I think about what’s that outcome I’m trying to achieve. If I have my LTV, my lifetime value figured out and subsequently I’ve got my allowable, what’s my maximum allowable cost per acquisition from Paid, then I will look at what’s the conversion to MQL rate by conversion action. And I might think about like let’s use this as an example, this idea of there’s a call, there’s a chat and there’s a form submit. What if the conversion to MQL rate is variable like you said? So let’s say chat it’s 10%. 10% of chat conversions are MQLs and 30% of calls are and maybe, I don’t know, 50% of form fills are. So I’m just making this up, right? So if you know that and you also know what your CPA is by conversion action, there might be an arbitrage opportunity because what if, like for instance, I’ll just throw it. For instance, like what if I could run a messenger campaign on Facebook to drive messenger leads for $2 that ultimately I can get way more volume and it will still result in a better aggregate cost per marketing qualified lead than if I was trying to optimize straight for form fills or something? Or like what if you threw all your dollars at the campaigns optimize for the form, fill the phone call and there’s no more volume and you’ve got to go upstream. Then you’re getting into display upper funnel or you’re adding channels, you’re going on to social. So it’s kind of like you can engineer the conversion objective and the funnel and stuff to achieve your MQL goal. And that’s what this is all about, is like beginning with end in mind and knowing what your MQL goal is and focusing on that outcome and that cost per MQL, cost per customer patient will allow you to do. I know that’s, sorry, that’s kind of.
Ray Sawvell: A soapbox no and kind of to go into that a little bit further. Like the trade off in a lot of these instances is either volume, so it’s understanding how much volume do you want to drive? Because if you can drive tons of chats through at like a $2 cost per acquisition, like you were saying earlier, but then if you think about your team, you’re going to be driving a lot more leads. So then for your team to score and qualify those leads, it’s going to be a lot more work internally. So when I tend to think about this, it’s like, how much stress do you want to put at your team while doing the appropriate amount of volume? So that’s another way to think about it is what’s an appropriate amount to send internally at the cost per acquisition that you’re sending for marketing qualified leads?
Ben Page: That was an awesome call out because so many times, right, like, oh, the sales team can’t handle that inbound lead volume or whatever. They can’t work on it and just they can’t do that work to kind of qualify. And you could talk about strategies to pre-qualify people and different funnel, webinar funnel.
Ray Sawvell: I’m sure many listeners have run like Facebook lead ads, for example, and they’re like, oh man, my agency or my team delivered so many junk Facebook lead ads because it’s low quality or it’s garbage and it’s like, well, how do you optimize better? And it’s like a different conversation, but it falls directly in line with marketing qualified leads. Like are they qualified? Are they not? Where do you put the budget? And that’s kind of like how is the buy happening? Like, where are you putting your dollars to work most efficiently for you?
Ben Page: Yeah, that’s cool. And you can do the same kind of engineering within the lead ad itself or within the forms on your website and same thing, you’re usually trading specificity for friction. In other words, the more fields you add, the more complicated the questions and the more in depth and detail they are, the lower in general the conversion rate might be. So it’s like trading off there too.
Ray Sawvell Exactly.
Ben Page: Do you want more burden on the team working and qualifying and you’re hedging for volume? Yeah, exactly.
Ray Sawvell: So that’s another way to think about it is volume versus stress on your team.
Ben Page: Yes. And then we talked about for lead generators, right. Thinking about down the funnel, it’s like, well, you want to know your website session to conversion rate, you want to know your conversion to MQL rate, your MQL to SQL rate, your SQL to close rate, and then know your lifetime value, your average revenue per customer. So if you know all those things, that’s great, and you’d probably want to know the absolute numbers and the percentages, and then you’d want to know the cost for all these different stages. And some of these are going to be pegged to some kind of goal. But if you do know those numbers, you can look for opportunities or sticking points and that can give you hints about, oh, we’re driving traffic, it’s not converting. Well, what’s going on? We’re getting MQLs, they’re not closing. What’s up there? We need to dig in.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah. And I think all of these are conversations that you need to be having internally or with your agency partner, your team, or whoever that may be. Because if your team is optimizing strictly for conversions only, like, this goes back to the risk piece. That’s a risk in itself if you’re only optimizing for these conversions. So understanding how to look at these close rates or MQL to SQL or session to conversion, all that kind of stuff, are conversations that you should be having internally and working towards something. So I think that’s like a key part is this isn’t data that’s going to come overnight, this is data that you’re going to have to spend time with, you’re going to have to battle test doesn’t make sense, and then start to roll out and implement throughout your campaigns and strategies.
Ben Page: Yeah, actually there’s one other dark horse metric Ray, that we didn’t really talk about yet, but for lead generators, right? Well, for many businesses, this is true. It’s like, okay, great, maybe you can achieve your cost per MQL goal and if you can, hats off. That’s awesome. But this notion of capacity, what if you can’t take on any more customers right now and understanding how long it takes someone to go from MQL to close and then into service and stuff. But I think for the marketing team to keep a pulse on Ops and capacity, we’ve seen this play out times too, right, where you can find efficiencies sometimes like, oh, we’re at capacity here. Well, maybe we need to pull back a little bit on these more demand gen efforts and vice versa. It can help you also inform if you have multiple locations, multiple product lines, multiple service teams or whatever. It can inform you, like, is your PPC budget aligned with that business outcome you need to drive, ultimately hitting a census in this treatment center, having X customers from this product or whatever?
Ray Sawvell: Yeah. And I think understanding like Chats, for example, might take up a number a month to close where phone calls might take two weeks to close, for example. So if you are at capacity and you can’t increase that capacity, understanding like, hey, maybe I need to push more chat conversions now because we’re not going to have room for a month or whatever time until you do have capacity. So that’s another key point.
Ben Page: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Optimizing for time as well and like knowing a third of all chats end up converting but through a drip after the fact or whatever. Yeah, it’s super cool. So what about how do brands and advertisers, how do you get to that place where you actually have that data? What are the kind of the critical ingredients or the difference makers? Obviously we’re using Google Analytics all the time, but let’s talk about this technology and data component a little bit. Evolving the strategy from just what you see in Google Ads.
Ray Sawvell: Yes, great question. I mean, once you have this data in a CRM in some way, I mean big ones typically are like Salesforce or HubSpot for example. You want to get that data and once you feel confident with it, you want to start feeding that data to the platforms in some way. So Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever, a lot of these platforms have built in connectors. So like Salesforce has a built in connector. You can feed all that data directly back to Google Ads, for example. And once you can start to optimize for MQLs or leads that are actually qualified versus just top of funnel leads, you’re really able to say, this campaign generated this many MQLs for me, let’s push more budget towards these campaign types. And then the other key part is that the smart bidding starts to learn around it too. So right now if you have a campaign set up, Google is only going to start to optimize around the conversions that you have in the platform. But if you start to move over data from these other platforms, you’re able to optimize for the leads that you’re importing. So the opportunities are leads from external CRMs.
Ben Page: Yeah, and two other call outs that came to mind. One is the organizations we’ve seen that do this really well. They’ve got some kind of bi, some kind of business intelligence dashboard, usually combining elements of the web analytics, the Google Analytics side with something like Salesforce HubSpot and usually maybe some internal data as well to kind of surface the KPIs that matter the most and sort of marry the reality on the ground business numbers with some of the marketing metrics and sales or outbound metrics, which is really helpful. And the other thing which it would be easier maybe for us to take for granted is idea of closed loop tracking ray. So having call tracking of some kind. Right. So there’s always going to be some play I think with Attribution, with MTA, multi touch Attribution, and comparing all my Ga four data match my HubSpot dashboard yeah, I mean, it’s going to happen, right? But I think what’s important is what are those paths to conversion the user on your website or through your campaigns? And are you actually tracking all three to have that ability, like you said, right, to ultimately say, look, here are my ten campaigns, here are my three conversion paths, here are the users that these campaigns brought to the site and then ultimately here were the outcomes. And imagine how disastrous and we’ve seen this repeatedly, it’s like client has the three paths and they’re tracking forms, but they’re not call tracking. And then surprise, like 80% of their conversions come through call tracking and it’s just absent and they don’t have it. It makes it much. All of a sudden you’re cutting off campaigns because the reported CPA is way high, but you’re not taking into account all the calls they’re driving or you’re using the out of the box call tracking.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, I mean, depending on the vertical you’re in, it’s key that you measure your online and offline conversions. So if you’re only looking at online, you’re definitely missing a major piece of the pie. So really, looking at online and offline and understanding what percentage goes towards online and offline, it will help you a ton. And to build off some other points that you had too. Ben, imagine a perfect world where you have all this data tied in from Salesforce or some CRM going back to your platforms. You’re able to be so agile in the way that you implement things like your speed is able to increase. So let’s say you have leads that you need to increase in a certain market. Let’s say you had to increase your California leads and you only have conversion data in the platform. You might have an idea like, oh, I think I should push budget over here, or I think I should do it here. Versus if you have MQLs, it’s like, this is the campaign, this is the keyword, this is the time, this is the whatever, and I can turn up the dial to 100 in that area and be like boom, lasered in, focused, agile, expand that right away. So I think that’s like a key insight that is missed here. If you don’t have this data, not that you’re playing guesswork to where you need to turn up the dial, but if you have this information in the platform, you can directly turn things up based on exactly what is qualified versus what isn’t by market if you have to.
Ben Page: That’s so awesome, Ray, because it’s one of those things where if you are talking with someone that doesn’t have a CRM and they’re thinking about it in terms of like, oh, it’s another line item, it’s another cost center, it’s painful even like call tracking. Like, oh, now I have to pay for a number and I have to pay to track it and stuff.
Ray Sawvell: So worth it.
Ben Page: It’s so worth it because this point alone, it’s all about speed. Data enables speed, time to insight and the ability. Like, this is where I love to be with one of our clients, where every morning we’re getting real numbers, real numbers from that day, the last 12 hours, but real on the ground operational numbers married with the marketing and sales information. So on a dime every single morning, we can optimize those campaigns to what’s actually happening in real life in those centers. And that speed, that agile responsiveness of how we can drive the campaigns and optimize. I cannot explain an ROI on the ability to have that data and that insight, but it’s huge because of the savings, because of our ability to quickly make a change that results in a business outcome that matters. It’s so crucial. So I just would urge people to kind of think of that as an investment.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, and it’s definitely not a magic wand. I know the way that we may be talking about it is like, get a CRM and make sure you’re tracking all this and it’s going to make everything better, it helps improve everything, but it’s not like a silver bullet in any way. You need to make sure the data is accurate and you’re using it accurately in all of your campaigns. So it definitely helps a ton. But it’s not just going to be like, set this up, get this going, it’s going to work right away. Typically, it’s like, we got to test it in this market or this area, and there’s a lot of battle testing and back and forth and conversations that need to happen before this becomes like, to ten x something, for example.
Ben Page: Yeah, and it’s one of our four pillars, data targeting creative structure. Data is the first one for a reason, because without it, your effectiveness tends to drop. But you can baby step this. The whole goal, I think, is to always be working on the four pillars. You’re always working on, you’re always evolving it, and you’re always testing it. It doesn’t have to be a huge, like, hey, now we’re going to go and drop six figures on a software license or something. Like, there are tools you can start to directionally, get closer with a lower kind of overhead and that maybe are more accessible for organizations of all different sizes. But man, that’s super cool. Ray, anything else to add before we kind of talk about some takeaways?
Ray Sawvell: I would say, again, I echoed this earlier, but have these conversations, they’re so worth it. It’s going to allow you to again, being fast in these key decisions is really important, but have these conversations internally with your partners, with your team. It’s going to give the team that you’re working with transparency to the numbers and allow you to make impact to the bottom line. So just have those conversations.
Ben Page: Yeah, I love it. For takeaways today, we want to leave you with several questions to reflect on. One, does your agency have this data to guide their decision making without it, it’s kind of like yeah, it’s like their efforts are totally hamstrung. And two, do you have a process to regularly review these numbers? All the numbers down the funnel percentages, the ratios that we talked about, the absolute numbers, the comparisons, and the capacity and so on. And three, do you have a strategy to balance growth and efficiency?
Ray Sawvell: I would say if you haven’t had these conversations before and you haven’t done this process to help review these numbers, both Ben and I and our team has had experience working with these types of numbers with clients. So ensuring that you regularly have these conversations and we know the questions to ask, so those are the type of things that you just need to be comfortable talking with to ensure that your marketing partner can help move your goals forward, essentially.
Ben Page: Right? And I think ultimately, big picture takeaway for marketing leader for Leadership team C Suite, folks. It’s like, how can you best align incentives of everyone involved, from marketing coordinator, agency, CFO, everyone involved aligning those incentives to achieve the business outcome you ultimately care about? And that’s why we focus at 2100 Digital on the business outcome and results based marketing to achieve MQLs closes patient new customers’ lifetime value to achieve those things over the leading metrics of cost per acquisition.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, and a different way that I think about that. Ben we’ve had these conversations several times and they’re not fun, but if we’re doing our job and paid is like winning, and we’re like, oh, paid is up 100% year over year, we’re going to use so many more leads, but the overall business goals are down, that’s a fail. Exactly. We’re not growing in the same direction. In the perfect example, metrics are up and everybody has that same common end goal in mind.
Ben Page: Yeah. Well, hey, if you don’t know where you stand today in relation to this in your pay per click campaigns, reach out to us. Hello at 2001 Hundreddigital.com. We’d love to chat. We’d love to have a conversation and learn more about your goals and your current situation and see if we can come up with a plan to get you to that desired outcome.
Ray Sawvell: See ya.
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