Increasing Paid Search Leads Across 19 markets

Semetrical were tasked with redefining and optimising the paid campaign structure across numerous international markets for Cloudflare Inc, a global web infrastructure and website security company.

We set out to achieve this by integrating business lead data into daily campaign optimisation processes, as well as aligning with Google’s automation developments.

Our work with Cloudflare is a strong example of how we have used a mix of biddable channels to consistently deliver innovation and success, helping realise the online potential and deliver against Cloudflare’s 12-month growth objectives.

At the start of 2019, we set out to achieve the following:

Objectives:

• Integrate business lead data into daily campaign optimisation
• Re-define campaign structure to align with Google’s automation developments

• Develop our approach to display campaigns and adopt Smart Display
• Expand RSA adoption for all markets and nurture localisation relationship with publishers
• Expand market support to English language countries

Targets:

• Increase paid search enquiries from 2,000 to 7,000 quarter on quarter
• Reduce cost per enquiry from $150 to $60 quarter on quarter

We were required to adapt our campaign optimisation and strategy to meet the requirements of a fast changing business and facilitate performance measurement throughout. All campaigns were optimised to accommodate Google’s latest optimal account structure, where it would see us shift more of our focus towards strategy.

As the foundation of our campaign strategy for Cloudflare, we focused on segmenting our audiences  into the following:

• Enterprise companies unfamiliar with the brand in the research and consideration stage of web security providers
• Decision makers who had previously engaged but dropped off from sales of specific products

It was imperative for Semetrical to work collaboratively and build strong relationships with a variety of internal teams at Cloudflare to fully understand their value proposition, audiences and business objectives.  We established a flow of insights between our paid media specialists and Cloudflare’s sales teams. This marketing and sales integration enabled us to share valuable data for optimisation processes, which was previously only available to the sales teams.  Our strategy was therefore focused around:

• Updating campaign structure to best suit the business objectives
• Leveraging and coordinating the management of client data to further optimisation
• Operating as an extension of an in-house performance team

Updating campaign structure to best suit the business objectives:

• We collaborated with Cloudflare and Google to determine how we should be shifting away from a traditional campaign structure. This led to campaign restructuring according to the relevant audiences for each product (with no segmentation required by match type).
• As part of this process, we updated the existing Display campaigns to Smart Display and this allowed Google’s AI and smart bidding to drive traffic while we focused on data insights and strategy development.

• We provided timely and regular updates via our bespoke reporting interface to Cloudlare’s stakeholders.

Leveraging client data in optimisation:

• Semetrical setup streamlined weekly exports and delivery of lead data direct from the Sales team, which allowed us to determine where and when leads eventually became invalid following interactions with the Sales team.
• This was cross referenced with our own publisher data to leverage a likelihood of what audiences would generate invalid leads and adapt our targeting accordingly.

Operating as an extension of in-house teams:

• Following the restructuring of our campaigns to target audiences by specific business products, we built a bespoke reporting dashboard to provide daily performance insights.
• This meant that any client observations around the performance for a specific product could be easily mapped to our campaigns. Similarly, any changes we made could be easily linked to changes seen at a business level
• This increased our ability to plan budgets efficiently on a quarterly basis and to effectively communicate how the changes we made impacted business performance, which allowed us to then increase the scope of our work so that we could roll out the same advances across more international markets