How Skedulo 18x’d ROAS
35x’d
PPC-attributed revenue
3x’d
Digital ad budget every year
1,833%
Increase in ROAS
1,692%
Increase in average deal size
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Bartek Woroniecki
Director of Marketing Operations & Programs at Skedulo
Seeking PPC Expertise
As a B2B SaaS company, we need our digital marketing arm to be working at peak efficiency. So early on we needed a PPC agency with expertise,” says Bartek Woroniecki, Senior Manager of Marketing Operations at Skedulo.
In Search & Perch, not only did Skedulo find the expertise they needed, but it developed into a long and fruitful working relationship. “It’s truly a testament to Benji that he’s been with us since 2017. He’s helped us grow, and grown right along with us.
The Challenge
Skedulo is a SaaS company serving the growing number of businesses with a deskless workforce.
They provide software tools to schedule, manage, and analyze mobile workers. The company has recently undergone a Series C funding round and is growing fast. That growth and the nature of their business presents numerous challenges for their digital marketing efforts:
- Serving virtually any industry with deskless workers means keywords can change with every use case.
- As the company grows, KPIs change, so keywords, ad copy, and landing page strategy must change as well.
- Investors want continual growth: larger deal sizes, expansion into new markets, and maximized return on investment.
- With a long sales cycle, measuring ROAS is particularly tricky
Digital marketing plays a critical role in each one of these challenges, but the one that comes up again and again is the long sales cycle that comes standard in the B2B SaaS world.
“Because you’re spending money up front, the long sales cycle is where things get tricky,” Bartek says. That is, there’s a lot of lag time between the first click and the final sale. In extreme cases, that lag time can last as long as a year. Because of this, it’s hard to answer this fundamental question: “Where do we spend our money to get the best results?”
The Solution
Building dependable measurability to scale Skedulo’s digital marketing success rapidly.
One of the first steps S&P takes with a new client is to “set up infrastructure in order to trace where traffic is coming from and where it’s converting from,” Benji says. “Without that, you’re effectively doing billboard or traditional advertising.” To put it bluntly, a company without this critical component is spending its digital marketing budget blindly.
This infrastructure allows S&P and their clients to track sales all the way back to the original ad click from the specific keyword that generated the impression (aka ad view). From here, S&P can begin to establish concrete ROI and ROAS benchmarks for their clients.
This is one of the central features that makes digital marketing so powerful. But it’s worth noting that all digital marketers are not alike. In fact, this raises a critical distinction between SEO agencies and PPC agencies like S&P.
While SEO focuses on generating “organic” search engine traffic for keywords that are important to a particular business, PPC focuses on determining the actual value of said keywords from an ROI perspective, using a platform like Google Ads. The big difference is that Google, probably as part of its business model, “shares a lot more data from paid traffic than from organic traffic. For organic traffic, Google often doesn’t show you the actual keywords that sent traffic to your website. And without these data,” Benji says, “tracking a conversion back to an organic visitor’s keyword can be very difficult, if not impossible.”
But because so many people believe the hype around digital marketing, they get sold on what Benji calls “vanity metrics” (e.g. clicks and impressions). “It’s easy to get traffic. Anybody can get traffic. The hard part is getting the right traffic,” Benji says. But what exactly does the “right traffic” mean?
At a general level, it’s quality vs. quantity. At a more specific level, it pivots on a company’s KPIs. For Skedulo, as business has grown, its KPIs have changed significantly.
When S&P first began working with Skedulo for example, all leads that a campaign generated were treated as equal (e.g. phone calls and lead form submissions were considered to be of equivalent value).
Evolving KPIs
keywords, ads, and landing pages that generate the most closed deals
These days however, not all leads are treated as equal. As such, S&P has worked with Skedulo to map out its entire digital marketing funnel, ensuring that the leads with the highest probability of turning into actual business are the ones that S&P has focused on measuring and optimizing for.
To put it simply, as KPIs evolve (e.g. leads for larger deal sizes are prioritized), the definition of “the right traffic” evolves too. This means that S&P has to identify the campaigns, keywords, and ads that produce the leads that satisfy these ever-evolving KPIs. It’s not easy, but for businesses with long sales cycles like Skedulo, it pays off.
The Results
Five years working together has created a strong trust and unique bond between these two companies. It’s these types of relationships that produce outstanding results. For example, in order to track and trace back to those first clicks, S&P has to be very closely aligned with the client and their tech stack, while the client has to be capable and willing to collaborate. As Benji says: “It’s not something that can be set up overnight. It takes time, trust, collaboration, and troubleshooting.”
So what have been the results from Skedulo’s working relationship with S&P?
“It’s hard to know where to begin,” Bartek says. “Our digital ad budget has increased more than 300% every year that we’ve worked with S&P.” He goes on, “they’ve helped us clearly measure the business we’ve generated directly from our ad campaigns, all the way down to the keyword level. So S&P has provided clarity and a process for top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel metrics, that’s understanding ROI.”
Bartek looked at his notes. “This is wild” he says. “Check this out.” Since the start of their
working relationship with S&P, Skedulo has:
- 1,833% Increase in ROAS
- 35x’d PPC-attributed revenue
- 1,692% Increase in average deal size
Skedulo grew PPC-sourced pipeline exponentially over the course of working with S&P:
SKEDULO
Pipeline Growth.
Benji is modest: “All this comes from the maturity of the working relationship we have. One of the key messages on our website says: ‘We get you the results you care about, not what we tell you to care about.’ And my relationship with Skedulo bears that out.”
Indeed, uncommon results come from uncommon relationships. “He’s a pillar of the organization,” Bartek says. “He might as well be a full-time employee.”
“But on second thought,” Bartek added. “I think it’s better to have an agency. You’ve got top expertise and know you won’t lose the continuity. Especially in the PPC world, I think it’s uncommon for a full-time employee to stay on as long as Benji has.”
There are a lot of reasons Benji has stuck around. But one is that over this long relationship he’s figured out that his expertise fits perfectly with Skedulo’s business model: “B2B, software, long sales cycles, focused on lead generation,” Benji says. “That’s definitely our wheelhouse.”
Toward the end of our conversation Bartek looked worried. “The problem is, there’s only one Benji. And after all my great quotes get printed, he’s going to start bringing us competing offers. So, this nice case study,” he paused. “Don’t make it too good, okay?”
Sorry Bartek.
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