For lead gen marketers, we know it’s not just about generating leads; it’s about attracting the right leads – those that are most likely to convert into valuable customers.

Value-based bidding is a strategic approach that allows businesses to focus on optimizing campaigns for conversions that truly matter.

We’ve seen value-based bidding work for online sales and brick-and-mortar businesses as well, but here we’re going to focus on using it for driving higher quality leads.

This is the first of five articles I’ll be sharing weekly to delve in deeper and build on each episode of our new video series on value-based bidding for lead generation.

As you’ll see in this first video below, each is short enough to take in over a quick coffee break.

We’ll start from the beginning and cover what it is and whether value-based bidding could be the right strategy to elevate your lead generation efforts in Google Ads.

The Power Of Quality Leads

Not every customer brings the same value to your business. High-quality leads are more likely to engage with your brand, convert into paying customers, and contribute to long-term business growth.

Value-based bidding is particularly beneficial for businesses that typically need to nurture relationships with customers between an initial online conversion and a final sale.

By focusing on quality leads, you can streamline your sales funnel, improve conversion rates, and ultimately boost your bottom line.

So how can you do that with value-based bidding?

Bidding To Value

Value-based bidding allows you to prioritize specific value goals that align with your business goals.

These goals could encompass sales, revenue, profit margins, or even the lifetime value of a customer.

With this strategy, Google’s AI uses billions of combinations of signals along with your first party data to identify conversions that are most likely to deliver on your defined value objectives.

It then optimizes bids to focus your ad spend on reaching those higher value customers.

The Basic Mechanics Of Value-Based Bidding

Value-based bidding offers two primary pathways to optimize your campaigns by bringing values into Smart Bidding:

• Maximize conversion value: If you’re working with a fixed budget, this option focuses on extracting the maximum lead conversion value from your campaign within the constraints of your budget.
• Set a ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) target: This option enables you to optimize for conversion value at a specific target ROAS to help ensure your ad spend generates a desired level of return. When you set a ROAS target, the system will optimize to find as much value as possible on average at your target. There are data thresholds to using target ROAS which we will cover later in this series, but this is the preferred strategy when you want to achieve specific ROAS goals and be able to respond dynamically to shifts in demand. Target ROAS is available for single campaigns or a portfolio strategy applied to multiple campaigns.

Value-based bidding will maximize the conversion value based on budget constraints and ROAS targets where applicable, so higher value customers will be prioritized over volume alone.

Keep this in mind when comparing target CPA performance, which optimizes for conversion volume irrespective of value.

While the emphasis will be on attracting high-value customers, it’s important to note that you might still see some medium to low-value customers depending on the dynamics of the ad auction.

When using ROAS targets, the higher your target, the fewer auctions your ads are likely to enter. In other words, ROAS targets are your lever to make your ads more or less likely to enter the auction.

Is Value-Based Bidding The Right Fit For Your Business?

Value-based bidding has seen success across a spectrum of industries, but whether it’s the right fit for you depends on your specific business needs and capabilities.

Before embracing this strategy, you’ll need to address these key questions:

Can You Assign Meaningful Values To Your Conversion Actions?

You are likely already differentiating your customers’ value in some facet, formally or informally.

You’ll need to set a concrete value to each conversion, whether through static proxy values like lead scores or dynamic economic values such as total profit. (We’ll cover proxy values more in the third article in this series.)

Do You Need To Strike A Balance Between Volume And Value Goals?

Bidding to value means your campaigns likely will not generate the same volume of conversions as they would using Maximize conversions with an optional target CPA bid strategy. This strategy is designed to return a higher total value of conversions. Bid simulators can help you to understand this tradeoff.

If you want to maintain a certain level of traffic, use the Smart Bidding bid simulator to help you gauge the optimal ROAS target that will yield your desired volume of leads while maintaining a focus on quality.

Lowering your target ROAS will increase your reach, and raising your target ROAS will decrease reach while seeking out higher value conversions.

Are You Able To Measure And Connect Your Value Data To Google Ads?

Access to accurate and comprehensive value data is a must for implementing value-based bidding effectively. To start, this means having proper site tagging to track conversions.

Feeding the right first-party data values into Google Ads is key to training the system to identify and differentiate predicted customer value for each auction.

If your value objective is sales value, for example, you’ll need to be able to measure and connect that data back to your Google Ads account. We’ll cover how to do that later in this series.

Reaping The Rewards Of Value-Based Bidding

The initial setup of value-based bidding typically requires some effort up front, but don’t let that intimidate you.

You can start with a more basic set up and adopt more sophisticated approaches that have more technical requirements, such as optimizing for margin or lifetime values for example, later if you wish.

Value-based Smart Bidding gives the system the flexibility to set each bid based on the predicted value of the conversion and target higher value conversions. Over time, it learns which users are more likely to be higher value and more profitable, then bids accordingly.

Bidding to find the most valuable customers can deliver incremental revenue uplift and profitability. Businesses that have found success with this strategy report a marked improvement in lead quality.

On average, advertisers that switch their bid strategy from a target CPA to target ROAS can see 14% more conversion value at a similar return on ad spend.¹

Beyond The Basics

While we’ve covered the foundational aspects of value-based bidding, we’re just getting started.

In the upcoming articles in this series, we’ll dive deeper into this strategy, including how to identify and leverage the right data and values for your business, and how to share your value information with Google Ads.

By aligning your campaigns with the conversions that truly matter most to your business objectives, you can optimize your ad spend, maximize your return on investment, and achieve sustainable business growth.

Up next week, we’ll talk about figuring out the right data and values.

^{SOURCE: Google Internal Data, Global, March 2021}

More resources: 

Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

Two things make a good website: content and functionality. Looks are nice to have but come last. 

Focus on these two areas to create a website that people will want to visit, return to, and tell their friends about. If the site offers the type of content that people need and makes that content easy to find and interact with, people will overlook even the ugliest designs. Case in point: Hackernews.com — a site with 5M monthly users (source) that looks like this:

This article covers the essentials of building a successful website, focusing on creating valuable content and ensuring strong functionality (checklist included). You’ll also learn how to avoid common pitfalls and see which tools can help you get started.

Just look at some top sites. They prioritize simple, clean layouts that highlight their content, like Canva and Seeking Alpha.

And I think you’d be surprised by how effortless Slack’s website looks — that company recently sold for $27.7B (source).

But you won’t make it with just any content — you need quality content. Quality content can mean different things to different people but in general, you can’t go wrong if you follow these simple rules:

• Relevant to your audience. Content should be tailored to what your audience cares about, making it more likely they’ll find it useful and engaging. One of the ways you can find relevant topics is with keyword research.
• Uses simple language and is well-organized. Make your content easy to understand, avoiding complex jargon or technical terms unless absolutely necessary.
• Unique: The content should offer something new or present information in a fresh way. Unique content helps you stand out from the competition and has a bigger propensity to reach more people through recommendations and SEO.
• Valuable to your business. Last but not least, if your site is business-oriented, the content on your site should help you run that business. It should either show how your product/service can help solve relevant problems or help earn more using another monetization method.

I’d like to pause for a moment on that last point and emphasize that content is not just about giving people something to read or watch. It’s also a great way to introduce your product or service.

At Ahrefs, we use a product-led content strategy. We create content that solves problems using our product, targeting topics with search potential to attract consistent, relevant traffic.

For example, our guide on “SEO friendly websites” ranks #1 in the US, bringing in users interested in practical tips and introducing them to our product.

People find us on Google and click to get the content, not to admire how the blog looks. If you want to see how product-led content works in action, watch this video:

Focus on functionality: it clears the path for content

Website functionality refers to how smoothly a site operates, ensuring users can easily navigate, interact, and achieve their goals with it. This includes quick page loading, responsive forms, and intuitive navigation.

If visitors can’t easily find what they’re looking for, or if the site is slow and frustrating to use, they won’t stick around to enjoy that content. That’s why the bounce rate on sites (it’s when a user quickly exits a site after opening it) increases so rapidly with every second of page load delay.

Functionality matters to search engines as well. The technical side of your site can impact its visibility for related keywords. When ranking pages, Google takes into account such technicalities as loading speed, mobile friendliness, and whether it uses the HTTPS protocol.

Tools like the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools make it easy to ensure your site is technically sound. With automated regular site audits, the tool identifies issues on your site and provides advice on fixing them. You will also get an overall health score for easier progress tracking.

What makes a good website: a simple but complete checklist

This straightforward checklist breaks down the core elements of a good website. You can use it yourself or show it to the person responsible for your website.

Content strategy	Have a plan for what kind of information and articles you will post on your site. Use our guide.
Analytics tools	Use tools to track how visitors use your site and how your site performs in Google, so you can understand what works and what doesn’t.
SEO error-free	Make sure there are no technical errors that prevent search engines from finding and indexing your site. You can do it for free with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools(AWT).
Good Core Web Vitals (CWV)	Ensure your site loads quickly and responds well to user interactions. Test right inside AWT or Google Search Console.
Accessible	Design your site so that everyone, including people with disabilities, can easily use it. Use a tool like  Accesibility Checker or WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation
Mobile-friendly	Make sure your site works well on smartphones and tablets, not just on computers. You can test that right inside AWT (usability and performance section in the All issues report).
Uses HTTPS	Secure your site to protect user information. You can get a certificate for free here.
Uses on-page SEO best practices	Optimize each page with relevant keywords, proper headings, and meta descriptions to help search engines understand and rank your content. Use our guide.
Consistent layout	Use the same colors and fonts throughout your website to create a cohesive and professional look.
Up to date	Keep your content current and relevant.
Tested on users	Show the website to a few people and ask them to use it as they normally would. Encourage them to be honest about what they find confusing or difficult.

6 common pitfalls of building a website and how to overcome them

Building a website is an exciting process, but it’s too easy to fall into common traps. Let me share the ones I’ve seen over the years with a bit of advice on how to overcome them.

1. Design by committee. Too many conflicting ideas can lead to a confusing and unfocused design. Try to limit decision-makers and focus on a clear vision. Prioritize decisions based on what’s good for the user.
2. Selling too hard. Overly aggressive sales tactics can alienate potential customers. Build trust by providing helpful information rather than pushing aggressive sales tactics (AI tools can help with that).
3. Unclear language. Ambiguous or complex wording can confuse users and obscure your message. Tools like the Hemingway app, Grammarly, or ChatGPT can help.
4. Poor SEO practices. Fortunately, SEO good practices are easy to follow, and over-optimization easy to avoid.
5. Not keeping the site up to date. Failing to regularly update content and features can make your site appear neglected and out of touch. Even something as simple as setting a monthly reminder to review your site will do the trick.
6. Not testing and iterating. Start by trying different things on your site to see what gets the best results. Pay attention to what your visitors like and respond to the most. Once you find what works well, focus on doing more of those things. This is how you go from a “good” site to a “great” site.

Just as it’s exciting, building and managing a site can get overwhelming quite fast. But the right tools can make the process smoother and more efficient. Here are some essential tools to help you get started (all can be used for free).

• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. A free tool for analyzing your website’s performance in Google. Use Ahrefs to check for SEO issues, track keyword rankings, and see who is linking to your site.
• Wix. A website builder that allows you to create and design a website without needing to code. Choose from customizable templates and drag-and-drop elements to build your site quickly and easily. If you need a bit more control over your design and you’re not afraid of coding, you can use one of the web design frameworks like Foundation or Semantic UI.
• Google Search Console. A free tool from Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results.
• Google Analytics. A free tool for tracking and reporting website traffic. Set up Google Analytics to see how visitors interact with your site, which pages are most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and more. Use this data to make informed decisions about how to improve your site (Matomo is a good alternative).
• Hubspot. A platform offering tools for marketing, sales, and customer service, along with a content management system (CMS). Use HubSpot to create and manage content, capture leads, and track customer interactions.
• Microsoft Clarity. A free tool for analyzing user behavior on your website. Set up Microsoft Clarity to see heatmaps, and session recordings to understand how visitors interact with your site.
• ChatGPT. An AI language model that can assist with every website building and management task. Use ChatGPT to brainstorm content ideas, and generate text and code for your website.

Final thoughts

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that the visual side of the website doesn’t matter at all. As the artist Max Kolomatsky demonstrates in this Instagram video, design can greatly improve the perception of a business.

The visual design of a website, while important, isn’t something to lose sleep over. Your site will achieve success more quickly and sustain it longer if you start with a good-enough design — such as a customized template — and focus on delivering real value through your content and functionality.

Visual design is also something easy to “overdo.” When trying to make a website look appealing, it’s common to add too many elements, colors, or effects, which can overwhelm visitors and slow the site down. A website is one of those things that need to be usable, and there’s hardly better advice than Dieter Rams’s “good design is as little design as possible.”

Got questions or comments? Find me on LinkedIn.

Searches for “How to humanize AI content” have grown 943% over the last 12 months. 

More people are trying to “pass the human check”, either to make AI content suck a little less or to blag AI content detection tools.

The process of “humanizing AI content” has become the de facto content strategy of growth-hungry companies.

I see stifled writers sprouting up everywhere, asking for advice on how best to navigate this content headache.

And I know just how soul-destroying it can be, because I’ve got the t-shirt.

Here’s why it’s a doomed effort from the start.

We all know the big glaring problems with AI content (and if you don’t, you can read about them here), but I don’t believe anthropomorphizing the bot is the solution.

In fact, I’d argue that humanizing the long-form content churned out by AI is an inherently flawed process.

The whole point of using AI is to drive speed, scale, and efficiency; getting humans to edit, and essentially rewrite, long-form AI prose completely undermines that value proposition.

By the time you’ve researched and added in the “rich” human element, you may as well have created the content from scratch yourself.

And the process of running “humanized” AI content through a detector is nonsensical – you’re literally getting an AI to validate humanity.

I’d spend hours editing the AI content I’d been saddled with so it could pass the human check, only to be gaslit into thinking my content was AI… by an AI?!

And I’m not the only victim. In a LinkedIn post, content consultant Kiran Shahid shared that AI detector tools would only verify her humanity when she wrote in first-person – a style of writing that clients are unlikely to sign off on.

I have seen similar experiences being shared in the Women In Tech SEO community…

And on Reddit…

Having human writers gussy up AI-generated content, only to have AI evaluate their humanity, is not just bizarre — it’s a flagrant waste of talent.

Tools like Claude allow paid users to create shared “Projects” containing up to 200,000 words of training documentation, while ChatGPT’s customGPTs let you train on up to 20 files, each with a maximum size of 512 MB.

Nishkarsha Kotian, SEO Specialist at Channel Engine feeds examples of her brand guidelines to a customGPT, and sets out rules for the bot to follow.

Similarly, Melissa Popp, Content Strategy Director at RicketyRoo, trains her customGPTs on knowledge documentation, and adopts a process of “few shot prompting” by providing examples of her best content.

Given that AI tools have a “memory”, you can also practise “iterative refinement” while chatting with them.

In other words, you can train them bit by bit, using advice and examples to improve the overall content output. Digital PR Expert Gini Dietrich describes AIs as “digital interns” in this respect.

The thing is, training takes up a lot of time, and even with all the context in the world, if you don’t have a clear vision of what you want from your digital intern you can easily get trapped in endless prompt loops.

So, training an AI model can lighten the load a little, but it’s far from foolproof.

Melissa Popp notes that customGPTs only get her 40-50% of the way there, and the effort expended in training often undermines the benefits.

It can be tricky to question “efficiency” strategies like humanizing AI – especially if they’re dictated on high.

Those making the decisions often don’t understand the reality of the work, and are only concerned with turning spreadsheet numbers green.

But it’s your job to make that reality impossible to ignore.

In my case, I took these steps:

• Regularly fed back on issues I faced during the process of “humanization” in meetings
• Tracked the time I spent “humanizing” AI in a collaborative spreadsheet to prove time-sink
• Outlined the risks of pushing out subpar AI content with examples of brands that tanked in the SERPs due to manual or algorithmic penalties

One approach I didn’t look into, but you could try, is guiding stakeholders towards AI content that doesn’t need as much of a human touch, like:

• Glossaries
• Product descriptions
• FAQs
• Wikis

If the ultimate goal is traffic, you could also consider proposing non-AI initiatives that have been proven to drive traffic at scale.

In Ahrefs’ recent research on the 50 Bootstrapped SaaS Companies Dominating SEO in 2024, the brands driving the largest YoY traffic growth had embraced three core strategies:

• “free tools” creation
• programmatic content
• content localization

Non-AI projects don’t have to be time intensive either. Zapier, for example, created thousands of feature-based landing pages programmatically, and then outsourced the page copy to partners during onboarding.

This kind of traffic-play is far more likely to satisfy a client/higher-up’s need for quick-win growth, giving you time back to focus on your job of creating quality content.

Final thoughts

In the words of Moz’s Senior Content Marketing Manager, Chima Mmeje:

AI content is not the problem. The problem is when the content is so poorly written, I can tell it was AI-generated. AI detectors are trash. If you hire a writer and you’re passing content through a detector as proof that it’s engaging or authoritative, then you should not be working with writers. Writers, I’m begging you to stop using AI to create entire content. Please use it as a guide to help you flesh out ideas, complete a thought process, or even clean up your writing, but that first draft should be 100% your work.

If you’re reading this and you have the power to dictate strategy, do away with the soul-destroying process of humanizing AI content.

Trust your humans to write content for humans.