10 Tips For Optimizing Campaigns Outside The Ad Platforms

In partnership with

I recently had the awesome opportunity to chat with Silvio Perez from AdConversion to discuss some B2B paid media marketing tactics.

During this conversation I shared 10 tips that I recommend B2B marketers explore when making optimizations outside of ad platforms. These tips are outlined below, but you can actually watch the full conversation here, or read the original blog post on AdConversion’s site.

10 Tips For Optimizing B2B Campaigns Outside of Ad Platforms

1. Dig into the GA4 page path report. B2B buyer journeys tend to be longer, with a more thorough research process. As a result, it’s likely that site visitors will poke around and visit multiple pages in a single session. The GA4 page path report can reveal common page combinations that people visit in a single session, which can then be used for ad copy and landing page content optimizations.

2. Use multiple data sources to measure paid media performance. This isn’t necessarily unique to B2B businesses, but buyer journeys are now more dispersed than ever. Trying to measure performance with only one data source usually paints an incomplete picture of any one channel’s effectiveness. I recommend using multiple sources such as CRM data, GA4, and ad platform reports.

3. Work with product or service team members to design lead magnets. Developing a strong lead magnet can improve the efficiency of any lead gen campaign. However, as marketers we don’t always have an understanding of what’s possible, or even desirable. I recommend meeting with product or service delivery team members to understand what features customers are frequently asking for. These requests can be great opportunities to package up a lead magnet for marketing efforts.

4. Get insights from sales and customer success team members to better understand customer behavior. Similarly to the above, sometimes the best source of customer research can come from people who speak with customers every single day. Putting together a formatted questionnaire to get feedback from sales and customer success teams can unlock insights that fuel many facets of marketing strategy.

5. Actually test or use the product or service you’re marketing. There are few better ways to understand the product or service you’re marketing than actually using it yourself. I’ve found that even sitting through an actual demo can shed light into what the product does, and makes messaging development much easier.

6. Get comfortable living in your brand’s CRM to better understand bottom line performance. This isn’t always commonplace in the agency world, but getting comfortable in a client’s CRM can be a game changer. It has helped me to connect paid media efforts to actual business outcomes, and speak the language of my clients during our meetings.

7. Put together a process to get regular insights from the sales team. Optimizing for traffic, or even leads, isn’t the end game in marketing. Routinely getting feedback from sales can inform which leads are low or high quality, and how marketing efforts can be adjusted accordingly.

8. Connect marketing efforts to actual business results. Simply reporting on “conversions” doesn’t help marketing teams present data to their C-suite (particularly CEOs and CFOs). Demonstrating the actual pipeline and revenue that marketing efforts have created is a great way to defend, and even unlock more budget in the future.

9. Build out leading indicators in your measurement strategy. I mentioned a few times that B2B buyer journeys are long. This means it might take some time to generate results, but paid media practitioners can’t be sitting on their hands for a few months waiting for the leads to start rolling in. Building out leading indicator metrics can provide early feedback signals for faster optimizations. 

10. Practice some patience! Driving real results takes time. Just because paid media is great for quickly generating clicks and impressions doesn’t mean that a few campaigns will be able to turn a business around by next month. Just like any other marketing discipline, it can be prudent to prepare, and play, for the long game here.

Wrapping Up

These are some of my top tips when it comes to paid media work that occurs outside of ad platforms. I’ve found that each of these practices have helped me in my own day-to-day work with clients, so I hope that you can find some value here as well!

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Marketers making $50K/month read this daily

Stacked Marketer is a free, daily newsletter that delivers curated news, trends, tactics, and actionable advice from the digital marketing world. 

It’s consumed in less than 7 minutes. And it keeps you on top of the industry.

Sign up for free.