[SaaS] Spectacular 82% Decrease In Cost Per Lead For Enterprise B2B SaaS

Table of Contents

FTM - Lathem-Case-Study

Who We Worked With

Lathem Time Corp. is based in the United States. With Lathem, employees can record their time and view their time card data on demand using an online time clock, mobile smartphones, a Lathem digital time clock, – or all three! All the employee time card information is easily integrated with payroll applications like Intuit QuickBooks, ADP, Paychex, and more, making the processing of payroll faster and easier. With Lathem’s system, companies can eliminate employee time theft, reduce unauthorized overtime, and ensure compliance with the Affordable Care Act and wage/hour laws.

Why They Chose Us

Lathem Time Corp’s paid ad campaigns were managed by other ad agencies with little lead generation success. They reached out to us because they wanted to work with an agency with a strong media buying team with expertise in Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ads in order to improve results and further scale their paid advertising efforts profitably.

Requirements

The client wanted to increase the number of qualified leads from their Google Ads campaigns and also wanted to explore the Social Media Ads. The overall result of the campaigns in the first quarter of 2020 was really bad and they were not getting new sales leads. 

The conversion rate was only 0.30% from Google ads campaigns including counting duplicate conversions (before Fantom Agency took over the management of their advertising efforts).

Google Ads Conversions

Challenges

The previous agency was not using all the available features of Google Ads and traffic was driving to generic website pages with no calls-to-action in ads or landing pages. Inside the ad accounts, many things were not set up properly, and the COVID19 pandemic was starting to gain traction. Lathem’s product is for time tracking and brick-and-mortar businesses were struggling to keep doors open or have people in the offices, this meant that Lathem needed to quickly push their online time tracking software and face-recognition time clock to companies that had to be on-premise.

The Solution

We assigned the account to one of our most senior Google media buyers with years of experience under his belt and who we knew could take our client’s campaigns to a hyper-profitable state. He reviewed the account, previously running campaigns, the nature of business, and the goal of advertising. He also did competitors’ research to deploy the best strategies to stay ahead of the competition and get Lathem’s product in front of businesses that could benefit from it.

How We Did It

The Fantom team understood the requirements of the business and got details on product usage from the product team. Drafted specific landing pages with clear detailed features of the products, high-quality images which explain the product itself even without reading about the product, and a quick contact form with a strong call to action. 

After approval from the product team, we developed the final versions of the landing pages and also developed other versions of the landing pages with different images/copy/structure and calls to action to test.

We set up different search campaigns for each product category that targeted the specific keywords that had the highest buying intent. We allocated the budget per the campaigns’ performance to achieve the highest results at the account level. Daily monitoring and the right optimization techniques improved the account performance consistently. We continue to test rigorously and find new learnings & areas to scale.

Apart from setting up search campaigns for different categories, we A/B tested bidding strategies to get maximum results from our Brand Search campaigns. We set up a Target CPA bidding strategy to keep CPA under control and set up another campaign with Maximize clicks bidding strategy to increase the presence of our ad for every brand search.

We also set up a Performance Max campaign – the newly launched campaign type by Google to take the benefit of Google’s AI and make the most out of our budget. Though this is a relatively new campaign type (just out of beta as of recently) it has proved to be a high-performing asset not just for Lathem, but for our other clients as well.

We set up Facebook campaigns with various ad creatives with clear calls to action. We executed high-tempo testing of many different audiences and audience types in order to find winning audiences that could be scaled while maintaining the right cost per lead to meet the client’s goals. We also implemented Facebook retargeting campaigns with various audience segments based on the level of intent and engagement which signal the quality of the audience being retargeted.

Results

Before working with us Lathem was achieving an average CPL (cost-per-lead) of slightly over $1,000/lead (this included phone calls), they were also double-tracking conversions and counting Smart Goals as primary conversions on Google (we adjusted our calculation of their average cost per lead to reflect that adjustment).

After they started working with Fantom, we were able to dial in their conversion tracking, no Smart Goals were tracking as conversions (since those were generally key page views, but no actual conversions) and the only conversions being accounted for were real landing page form submission and phone calls that lasted a minimum of 60 seconds. We were able to bring their average CPL down from over $1,000 to right under $180 on Google ads.

Google Ads Results

Lathem had done no Facebook advertising in the past and they wanted us to start handling that as well, we built up their account from the ground up and were able to generate some very significant results for them as well spending over $130k from the time we took them on to the date of this case study, and generating over 1,024 leads for an average cost per lead of $127.62.

The results were phenomenal.

Facebook Ads Results SaaS
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