DATADOG CASE STUDY

THE GOAL

Grow Saas License sales

THE STRAIGHT LINE THINKING

Product – cloud-based application monitoring

Strategy – dominate digital share of voice

THE RESULTS

Doubled lead volume

Datadog is an innovative SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform for IT infrastructure, operations, and development teams. It brings together data from servers, databases, applications, tools, and other services to present a unified view of the applications that run at scale in the cloud. Datadog’s platform is loved and trusted by thousands of enterprises including Zendesk, Citrix, Airbnb, HP, PagerDuty, and Shopify. Datadog works seamlessly with over 100 turn-key integrations, allowing teams to build real-time interactive dashboards, search and correlate metrics and events, collaborate in real-time, and more.

THE CHALLENGE

We were charged with helping Datadog increase market share and total volume of qualified leads, with liberal allowance to ramp up budget and spend as necessary.

poorly rationalized campaigns

poorly chosen keywords taking up all of the budget

poor Quality Scores

search terms report wasn’t being analyzed regularly

Landing page was in need of a makeover

URLs had no type of tracking technology behind them

Recognizing these program issues, we were essentially charged to help Datadog increase market share and total volume of qualified leads, while generally maintaining the cost structure, with liberal allowance to ramp up budget and spend as necessary.

Solution

Our first order of business was to clean up all the obvious inefficiencies in the account. These measures included making appropriate adjustments across segments, ad groups and keywords, geography, and device types. We also closed up gaps or leaks produced by certain keywords by pausing egregious offenders that generated a lot of clicks and ate up a lot of cost, but drove very few conversions.
For the obvious winners, we boosted their bids and therefore average ad positions substantially in order to consolidate our position in the “money” keywords. The negative keyword list in the shared library was bolstered substantially and applied across all of the active campaigns in order to eliminate waste on some obviously irrelevant queries, like those related to employment or customer service. Missing ad extensions were also rolled out in order to make the greatest use of AdWords’ allowable ad real estate. In the second phase, we worked on bringing the landing page up to par with modern practice and demanding user expectations. This meant creating a clean, intuitive, no-fuss, conversion optimized landing page that had as its central tenets: unambiguous communication of Datadog’s differentiators and benefits as well as easy of signing up new customers and capturing leads. This effort, combined with the tagging of all URLs with custom tracking parameters created a robust, end-to-end loop that allowed us convert, engage, and remarket to our users much more effectively. In the final phase, we launched completely new campaigns to supplement the modified legacy campaigns in order to capture additional traffic that fell between the cracks of the then extant keyword paradigm. In particular, we built completely new campaigns around individual technologies and integrations that enjoyed much lower than account-wide average CPAs, due to their specificity and relevance. On a whole, this represented tens of new campaigns, with scores of new ad groups and keywords under each one. We also worked closely with the Datadog marketing team to write up ads that were relevant and specific to each integration and technology, thereby ensuring optimal quality scores. Lastly, we reconfigured the existing remarking campaigns with new banners and increased our exposure throughout the Google Display Network with intelligently chosen placements that guaranteed a good return.
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We cleaned up all the obvious inefficiencies in the account. This included making appropriate positive and negative adjustments across segments, ad groups and keywords, day parts, geography and device types.

Next, we worked to bring the landing page up to par with modern practice and demanding user expectations. This meant creating a clean, intuitive, no-fuss landing page that had conversion optimization as its central tenet.

After that, we launched completely new campaigns to supplement the modified legacy campaigns to capture additional traffic that fell between the cracks of the keyword paradigm. We built new campaigns around individual technologies and integrations that enjoyed much lower than account-wide average CPAs due to their specificity and relevance.

Lastly, we worked closely with the Datadog marketing team to write up ads that were relevant and specific to each integration and technology, thereby ensuring optimal quality scores. We reconfigured the existing remarking campaigns with new banners and increased our exposure throughout the Google Display Network with intelligently chosen placements that guaranteed a good return.

RESULTS

We were able to meet Datadog’s goals of increasing the volume of high-quality leads while maintaining the same (or better) ROI.

Datadog’s budget and ad spend were increased, but the efficiency with which we converted leads stayed the same or improved, with a greater volume of leads overall.

The entire customer experience was improved end-to-end across the entire funnel, as the ad copy and landing page were substantially improved. The follow-up via better tracking and remarketing also ensured that we were able to make the best use of our data, and re-engage an interested audience.