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Scale Your B2B Lead Generation With Discovery Ads

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Scale Your B2B Lead Generation With Discovery Ads

B2B lead generation marketers: Have you tried Google Discovery ads yet?

According to Google, Discovery ads:

“…help you reach up to 2.9 billion people as they browse feeds on YouTube, check the Gmail Promotions and Social tabs, and scroll through Discover to catch up on their favorite topics.”

What Are Discovery Ads?

Unlike Search ads, Discovery ads are visual, responsive, and dynamic. Format and exact layout will depend on where the ad appears, among other factors.

Like many Google products, on initial review, Discovery ads seem to be geared toward ecommerce rather than lead generation/B2B advertisers.

All the examples in Google’s help section are shopping, or ecommerce focused.

Screenshot from Google Ads, October 2022

As a result, B2B advertisers might be gun-shy about trying Discovery ads.

Don’t be!

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We have found that Discovery ads are an efficient way to drive both awareness and leads for B2B advertisers.

How To Successfully Use Discovery Ads For Lead Generation

Discovery ads are an effective tool to use mid-funnel in the buyer journey.

The Discovery ad format falls between Google Display (upper funnel) and Search (lower funnel).

The best time to use Discovery ads for lead generation is when you’re not getting the lead volume you want from Search, possibly because you’re advertising a new product that users may not be aware of.

Discovery ads have the dual benefit of generating awareness while optimizing for conversions.

Because the ads appear beyond the search results page – in YouTube and Gmail – you’ll reach users who may be earlier in their decision journey, and help make them aware of your product.

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Combine With Retargeting

As with most upper and mid-funnel tactics for lead generation, it’s important to use Discovery ads in combination with retargeting for the best results.

In fact, you can even use retargeting audiences within your Discovery campaigns. More on that in a minute.

Complement Search Campaigns

You also want to make sure you’re using Discovery in combination with Search ads.

Since Discovery ads can be targeted by keyword using a custom segment, you’ll want to be sure you’re bidding on the same keywords in your Search campaigns.

We usually use keywords from existing Search campaigns to create our Discovery custom segments.

But if you’re launching a brand new campaign, it may work the other way around; You’ll create a custom segment first and then use those keywords in a new Search campaign.

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Target Competitor Keywords

Another great use of Discovery ads is to target competitor keywords.

Unlike competitor targeting in Search, which tends to be expensive due to poor quality score, competitor targeting in Discovery works more as it does in paid social.

The competitor keywords act as a signal to tell Google the type of users who would be interested in your ad.

Measuring conversions correctly is crucial to achieving successful lead generation with Discovery ads.

This is true for any Google Ads campaign, but especially so for higher-funnel ad types like Discovery.

Set Up Micro Conversions

For some B2B advertisers, true lead volume might be too low for Discovery to work efficiently.

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In this case, you’ll want to set up micro conversions – non-lead actions that indicate a user is engaged and raising their hand.

Actions like viewing a video or downloading an ebook can be considered micro conversions.

Micro conversions will help drive enough signal volume to your Discovery ads campaign regarding the type of users you want to reach.

Connect Lead Sources to Google Ads

Another recommendation is to connect lead sources to Google Ads.

Usually, conversions measured in Google Ads are not qualified leads; they’re an action that indicates a lead, such as a form fill or an asset download.

These initial contacts go into a lead system, where leads are qualified and scored. These are often called “marketing qualified leads” (MQLs).

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Some companies also use “sales qualified leads” (SQLs) or “advertising qualified leads” (AQLs).

Whatever you use, there is an interim step between a user successfully completing a form and becoming a lead in the CRM.

Luckily, Google Ads allows advertisers to import data on qualified leads from their CRM system. Most popular CRMs, such as Salesforce and HubSpot, are supported.

You can use your CRM data as your primary conversion if you have enough lead volume. Or you can use the data for reference just to make sure you’re actually getting qualified leads.

This is especially important if you are using lead form assets.

Often, advertisers see a high volume of poor-quality leads from lead form assets (formerly called lead extensions). Importing data from your CRM will help you see how many of these form-fills became qualified leads.

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Setting Up Discovery Ads For Success

Correct campaign setup is key to successful Discovery ads campaigns.

Choose Your Targeting

Discovery ads have several different targeting options. You can target by keyword, audience, in-market, or topic targeting.

We’ve found that creating separate ad groups for each targeting option is best; that allows you to see how each option performs and optimize based on performance.

Be sure to include ad groups for relevant retargeting audiences.

If your retargeting audience is big enough, Discovery is a highly effective way to reach these users with a relevant offer that can entice them to convert.

Carefully Establish KPIs

While Discovery campaigns use the max conversions bidding strategy, you won’t want to hold them to the same key performance indicators (KPIs) as your Search campaigns.

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Remember, Discovery campaigns aren’t running just in Search – they appear in YouTube search results and in Gmail.

While users in these channels may be doing some type of searching, the intent isn’t the same as it is for those searching on google.com.

You’ll find that Discovery users are further up the funnel, so your clicks per action (CPAs) will likely be higher than in Search.

Use All Available Assets For Your Ads

In addition to supplying headlines and descriptions, you’ll want to include images for your Discovery ads.

Provide all the recommended sizes/aspect ratios, as this will help ensure your ads appear in as many placements as possible.

Google suggests that advertisers use at least three headlines, descriptions, and images (in portrait, square, and landscape formats) to maximize ad delivery.

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Find more Google Discovery best practices here.

A Couple Of Case Studies

We have successfully used Discovery campaigns for our B2B clients to drive leads at an efficient cost.

For one of our tech clients, we launched Discovery campaigns with the initial goal of increasing scale while maintaining efficiency.

We wanted to see how we could incorporate new campaign types into our SEM strategy and how they would fit into our existing full-funnel approach.

We launched with separate audience lists, each built into distinct ad groups. We leveraged our legacy audiences and tapped into product-based lists.

The result?

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Discovery campaigns saw 690% more impressions compared to SEM campaigns. Better yet, Discovery drove 93% lower cost per click and 70% lower cost per visit.

The client was thrilled with these results and is moving forward with a large buildout of Discovery across their entire product line.

discovery ads caseScreenshot from author, October 2022

We saw similar performance for another client in the tech vertical. The client was already using Search, Display, and YouTube.

They had the top and bottom of the funnel covered – they just needed a mid-funnel strategy.

Enter Discovery ads.

The results for this client were nearly identical to the first example above.

Discovery ads saw significantly lower cost per click (CPCs) and lower cost per lead (CPL) than Search, with Discovery driving 60% as many leads as Search for only 32% of the cost.

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additional discovery ads caseScreenshot from author, October 2022

In these two examples, Discovery ads were an efficient way to cast a wide net and reach qualified users who may not have otherwise seen our ads.

Caveats For Discovery Ads

As you can see, Discovery ads can be a highly effective mid-funnel tactic for driving leads. But they’re not perfect.

It’s important to understand what to watch out for when launching Discovery campaigns.

Make Sure You Have Enough Assets

This includes images and ad text.

Think of Discovery ads like paid social ads. The more ad variations you use, the easier it is to test and avoid ad fatigue.

If you only have one image and one text variation, your ads will probably not perform well. More is better.

Watch Your Impression And Click Volume

Especially if you’re using customer match audiences, you might find that volume is very low for your Discovery campaigns at first.

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Remember, Discovery campaigns run on a max conversions or target CPA bid model. To drive conversions, you’ll need to drive impressions and clicks.

If that doesn’t happen soon after launch, you’ll find your volume throttled heavily as the system tries to find traffic that will convert.

Your traffic might even drop to zero.

Small customer match audiences can pose volume challenges with any campaign, but especially for Discovery, where there is no “max clicks” bidding option.

Don’t Expect Your Discovery Campaigns To Do Everything

We’ve had clients test Discovery, expecting they’ll see leads at the same cost as Search. And while I’ve shared two examples of that happening, it isn’t always the case.

We’ve tested Discovery campaigns that drove thousands of clicks but only one or two leads, with CPLs 20x that of Search.

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Discovery doesn’t work for everything.

It’s also important to remember that Discovery isn’t the same as Display; CPCs will usually not be nearly as low as they are for Display.

We’ve found that Discovery CPCs are usually closer to Display than they are to Search, but they’re still about 50% higher than Display.

So if low-cost clicks are your objective, or you’re trying to build a retargeting audience, Display is a better choice than Discovery.

If you’re looking to scale your B2B lead generation efforts beyond Search, give Discovery ads a try.

They’re worth testing.

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Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock

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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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