28% Increase in MQLs Driven For Our Enterprise B2B Financial Services Client

Our client, in the financial services industry, approached us intending to refine their digital marketing strategy across Google Search and Display to generate high-quality leads for a wide range of products. Despite previous successes in driving traffic and initial lead volume, our client challenged us to find solutions and strategies that generated leads that made it through the sales funnel in a security-approved way.

Financial services involve complex decision-making processes and a higher level of consumer trust and understanding. This complexity adds layers of challenges in not only attracting but also qualifying leads who are interested in the products and services offered.

With these challenges in mind, Workshop Digital developed a Google Ads paid search and display strategy aimed at hyper-focused optimizations toward a more qualified audience.

Our client challenged Workshop Digital to drive stronger MQL (marketing qualified lead) volume, although marketing-generated lead volume was consistent through Google Ads Paid Search and Display. There was also a focus on ensuring these MQLs continued through the sales funnel to better understand the true ROI (return on investment) of the brand's digital marketing efforts.

Even more challenging was that in the financial services industry, there’s a lot of red tape regarding what data can be shared and where. Due to that, Workshop Digital was unable to connect Google Ads with Salesforce to inform stronger optimization toward more qualified leads. Therefore, we needed to work with the client team to find a security-approved solution that allowed for that data integration to enhance our optimization efforts.

In collaboration with the client’s in-house analytics team, Workshop Digital was able to request automated exports of data which included recent MQL data from Marketo. This was, in return, uploaded (and approved) manually into the Google Ads account.

In previous campaign strategies, Workshop Digital only had access to “demo leads” and “non-demo leads” set as “conversions” in the Google Ads account. These were the only conversions that the Paid Media team and the Google algorithm had to optimize the campaigns toward in any given day, hour, or minute.

By layering on true MQLs in the accounts conversion actions, we were able to weight the conversion value toward these specific actions ultimately telling us that these actions were more valuable to optimize against. In this initial setup, alongside leveraging Maximum Conversion Value bidding on top of over 150 campaigns across 11 business lines, Workshop Digital was able to prioritize these bottom-funnel actions compared to the generic demo and non-demo leads.

Our strategies have consistently driven a stronger rate of MQLs and opportunities at a more efficient cost-per-MQL rate since implemented in May 2023. From May 2023 to February 2024, we’ve driven 3,722 MQLs at an average cost-per-MQL of $453.

The strategy shift also led to almost immediate positive results – just in the second month after full implementation, we drove +28% more MQLs at a -43% decrease in cost-per-MQL.