The Secret to Refining Your Bidding Strategy with Micro-Conversions

Let’s suppose you’re a B2B marketer using the Marin platform. Hopefully, you’re using the more sophisticated “Revenue by Conversion Type” revenue model, and you’ve associated relative values to each conversion type in your website. If you’ve done all this…congrats! You can use Marin to bid to a lifetime value/cost ratio that’s most appropriate to your business.

However, by refining your strategies even more, you can increase the likelihood of boosting your lead generation.

Hone Your Strategy

During my first Marin onboarding, I received some pretty sage advice. My Marin rep told me I should allocate a small portion (10%, he told me) of the lifetime value from each conversion to a point earlier in the funnel. This serves as a vehicle for increasing relevant traffic diversity, which ultimately leads to more sales. If I were to assign 100% of lifetime value only to terms that converted at the bottom of the funnel, I would hinder my ability to grow the account.

What’s a good lifetime value reallocation strategy? It’s easy! Are there intermediary downloads on your site that lead people down the conversion funnel? Create a conversion type for each and assign each a value. Are there high-intent pages on your website that represent the penultimate step before conversion? Create a conversion type and assign people who land on that page some lifetime value. Are you doing email marketing with unique click-through pages? Create a conversion type for people who click on the email link and land on the site, and assign those folks a value. There are plenty more ways you can get creative with micro-conversions.

Adjust Values for Maximum Conversions

With a multi-layered micro-conversion strategy, it’s easy to either over-assign or under-assign value. You should have an understanding of how many micro-conversions each visitor typically completes, and set your values so that the “average” visitor will get assigned an “average” pre-sale value. Engaged visitors who trigger an above-average number of micro-conversions should be more likely to convert; by counting each, Marin’s bidding algorithm will favor the keywords that tend to generate hyper-engaged visitors.

Also, you can use micro-conversions as a traffic lever. If you decide a certain download has become a more valuable part of the sales process, raise its value. Marin will favor traffic more likely to download that item, and you’ll generate more downloads of that document. Whereas Marin’s Boost function will raise the bids allocated to an entire bidding folder, raising the bids on a conversion type is a hyper-specific way to impact your entire traffic flow – either within one bidding folder or throughout the whole campaign.

Marin is a wonderful platform to increase the value of your paid search efforts. And, with a little extra insight into the value of each step of your sales funnel, you can use Marin’s functionality to optimize your campaign’s performance to an even higher level.