Situation

Our construction based partner is the leading and fast-growing provider of foundation repair and water management solutions in the United States, known for its vertical integration and efficient service through in-house manufacturing and advanced software. With over 30+ branches within 45 locations across the continental US, their primary mission is to repair, protect, and enhance customers’ homes, offering peace of mind from the initial contact to ongoing annual maintenance. As their media partner our goal was to deliver steady traffic and qualified leads to all brands across multiple states. Given that our marketing philosophy is analytics driven marketing, we saw an opportunity to use video – using known as “reach” media partners as a performance channel using our custom data-driven metrics to drive website engagement and qualified leads.

---

Objective

---

Leverage video tactics to increase leads while driving efficient cost/qualified leads, leading to more booked appointments. Also, test bid strategies that will efficiently drive more qualified leads across all brands.

• Increase qualified leads by 25% while maintaining the same CPL (cost per lead)

---

Results

---

With our high-value based bidding YT campaigns and video a/b test, we were able to derive higher quality leads and performance across our video campaigns and client’s business; additionally proving out video to be a performance channel if optimized correctly.

On an increased spend of +34%, our optimization efforts drove +380% high quality leads with a -72% CPQL (cost per quality leads) YoY. YouTube Shorts found success in driving 64% of Qualified Lead Volume while also being more efficient than standard videos. On average, video campaigns drove a 3.8x increase in Appointments while dropping CPBA (cost per booked appointment) by -72%. Overall our leads quite literally nailed our goal and improved 3.7x YoY by converting video to a performance channel by leveraging value-based bidding.  

Implementation

​​

In 2021, Google obtained an immensely large dataset focused on consumer intent to guide its decision-making process, complemented by top-tier AI and machine learning capabilities that assist advertisers in making informed choices for their clients and businesses. Nevertheless, this dataset had limitations, failing to include account-specific details, such as customers who made purchases through Google ads but later returned them, or variations in customer value based on geographical locations. Cue value-based bidding. Value-based bidding steps in to bridge this informational gap by allowing businesses to communicate to Google which sources of traffic they regard as the most and least valuable. To increase the efficiencies of value-based bidding, and being that we’re an analytics-first agency, we used our custom metrics across our YouTube Video campaigns to increase the quality of these metrics, leverage our high-value customers and elevate our optimization tactics in our campaigns. 

ViV (view-influenced visit) is our proprietary more impact-based optimization KPI for video invented years ago to ensure that your media dollars are truly impacting your website traffic and additional business KPIs. Our brand efforts for all partners track ViV (View Influenced Visits) and eViV (Engaged View Influenced Visits – 2+ pages visitation). Our reasoning behind these metrics – simple, we believe that the KPI chosen for optimization should have a balance both of quality and reach. Therefore to create this balance within value-based bidding our team implemented custom bidding across our YouTube Video campaigns using an API connection with our data-aggregation tool Conversionomics. Such data allows for closer alignment between potential customers reaching our partner’s website and how likely they are to be a qualified lead and step up an appointment with their nearest brand. Previously our video campaigns were optimizing towards maximizing conversions, only focusing on ViV and eViV, but using this custom bidding metrics, our campaigns were now optimizing towards value based bidding based on eViV + qualified leads, allowing us to turn what is usually known awareness channels to a lower funnel performance-based strategy.

In addition to using value based bidding across our video campaigns, our team also tested both YouTube videos and YouTube Shorts ad types within the campaign to ensure optimal efficiency and reach within our core audiences.