DATADOG CASE STUDY
THE GOAL
Sell more Saas Licenses
THE STRAIGHT LINE THINKING
Product – cloud based application monitoring
Strategy – dominate digital share of voice
THE RESULTS
Doubled Lead Volume
THE CHALLENGE
When Datadog first came to us, their account clearly showed signs of mismanagement and lack of strategic cohesion/vision. Individual campaigns were poorly rationalized and delineated in ways that produced significant overlap and cannibalization across the board. There was no persistent effort to modulate bids based on relative performance across ad groups and keywords, and a select few egregiously chosen keywords were sucking up all of the budget from the rest of the campaign, and prevented them from getting a fair shot. Certain keywords were not only to broad to begin with, but also set on broad match type, thereby letting in a lot of superfluous and wasteful clicks and impressions that woefully inflated costs. There was also a lack of care being placed on ad copy, so that a precious few ad types were unilaterally applied across the board for various types of indications, use cases, and angles of inquiry. The search terms report wasn’t being combed regularly, and the lack of attention showed in the thinness of the the negative keywords list. What more, all of the extension types weren’t being adequately utilized, an entire swatch of long-tail keywords were being left out, the landing page was sorely in need of a makeover and lift, remarketing wasn’t being pursued to its fullest potential, and URLs had no type of tracking technology behind them whatsoever. For a company that didn’t care so much for CPA so much as increasing market share and number of leads, it sure wasn’t showing a good effort at clearing the disorganized mess with which we found its digital marketing regime. Recognizing this, 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. Read More
poorly rationalized Individual campaigns
egregiously chosen keywords were sucking up all of the budget
poorly rationalized Individual campaigns
The search terms report wasn’t being combed regularly
Landing page was sorely in need of a makeover and lift
URLs had no type of tracking technology behind them
Solution
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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Our first order of business was to clean up all the obvious inefficiencies in the account, the low hanging fruit optimizations. These measures included making appropriate positive and negative adjustments across segments, ad groups and keywords, day parts, geography and device types.
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.
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.
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.
75%
75% increase
in sales demos
40%
CPA reduction from previously
unsustainable mark
3%
CTR went from sub 1%
to over 3%
