
How SaaS Startups Should Be Using AdWords - dangrossman
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/06/15/adwords-for-saas-startups
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shostack
Senior digital media guy at a SaaS company.

A lot of this is spot on, but I think there's a big miss, particularly on the
display side. Conversion tracking is everything, and unfortunately, display
(and video as a subset of that) is about the toughest thing to measure out
there from an ROI standpoint.

Odds are you won't see click conversions as the bulk will be view-throughs.
That leads you to the question of "what's the value of a view-through
conversion?" Well, for starters, without an ad server like DCM, you won't have
any view-through revenue numbers (AdWords obviously has the data, they just
don't expose it in the interface--no idea why not). That gets into a messy
cross-channel attribution discussion. I'd love to see more written on valuing
display for companies with a sales cycle of 30+ days with multiple touch
points.

The other thing is being careful about last click attribution. AdWords just
released some data-driven attribution models in AdWords which are cool, but
only a partial picture because it is just AdWords data (not other channels
like you'd find in GA Premium), and no display data. That said, it can still
be useful to see if certain campaigns/terms are awareness generators that are
having their conversions "cannabalized" by other campaigns or keywords on a
last click tracking basis. If you are getting into things like RLSA targeting
("Retargeting Lists in Search Ads," so like display retargeting but on the
search network), you might want to see if they are grabbing the last click
credit away from the campaign that originated the initial interest.

