How SaaS Startups Should Be Using AdWords

Senior digital media guy at a SaaS company.

A lot of this is spot on, but I think there's a big miss, particularly on the display side. Conversion tracking is everything, and unfortunately, display (and video as a subset of that) is about the toughest thing to measure out there from an ROI standpoint.

Odds are you won't see click conversions as the bulk will be view-throughs. That leads you to the question of "what's the value of a view-through conversion?" Well, for starters, without an ad server like DCM, you won't have any view-through revenue numbers (AdWords obviously has the data, they just don't expose it in the interface--no idea why not). That gets into a messy cross-channel attribution discussion. I'd love to see more written on valuing display for companies with a sales cycle of 30+ days with multiple touch points.

The other thing is being careful about last click attribution. AdWords just released some data-driven attribution models in AdWords which are cool, but only a partial picture because it is just AdWords data (not other channels like you'd find in GA Premium), and no display data. That said, it can still be useful to see if certain campaigns/terms are awareness generators that are having their conversions "cannabalized" by other campaigns or keywords on a last click tracking basis. If you are getting into things like RLSA targeting ("Retargeting Lists in Search Ads," so like display retargeting but on the search network), you might want to see if they are grabbing the last click credit away from the campaign that originated the initial interest.