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Mohammed Alqasir, CEO of Rewaa, believes technology can change the world for the better. He's committed to building innovative and impactful solutions that improve people's lives.
Imagine this: you launch an online ad, and it generates significant interest, but very few people click through to buy your product. Marketing nightmare, right?
We recently experienced this at Rewaa, a cloud-based software company in Saudi Arabia that offers inventory, point-of-sales, and accounting management solutions for retail businesses. In 2023 we closed an investment round worth USD $27 million, led by the Saudi Telecommunications Company (STC). With growth targets increasing alongside our funding, our success depended on maximising our marketing spend efficiency.
When one of our recent campaigns received clicks but no conversions, we knew it was time to pivot our strategy and focus on the quality of our leads, not just the quantity. So, we partnered with Google and Assembly MENA to help us get that right.
Navigating the complex path to purchase
Our funding coincided with a massive shift in Saudi Arabia’s business landscape. The country’s Zakat1, Tax, and Customs Authority (ZATCA) issued a new regulation that required all Saudi businesses to integrate their invoicing system with the authority.
As a result, interest and demand for retail management software grew. Business owners were searching for reliable solutions that not only helped them manage finance and operations but also integrated with ZATCA. Our software was an ideal candidate.
While we wanted to tap into that opportunity and increase market share, it wasn’t that simple. The online path to purchase is messy. Business owners don’t buy the first software they come across, and do a lot of research — online and offline — to compare the different options. Only once they’re confident do they hit the buy button.
Beyond clicks: The pursuit of quality leads
Our ads showcased our main value proposition: namely that we link with ZATCA and comply with tax regulations. Still, people were clicking but not buying. We realised it was crucial to understand how a customer behaved before closing a deal. We deep-dived into our sales data, exploring the customer journey online and offline.
We measured the effectiveness of our campaigns based on lead quality and interest. The lead classification system used during the lead-to-sale process was split into stages:
- Lead: Anyone who clicked an ad and filled out a form with their details. This was the main measurement, and the only one we factored in as a conversion goal on Google Ads.
- Marketing-qualified lead (MQL): Leads who met the criteria as potential customers but who hadn’t shown interest in our software.
- Sales-qualified lead (SQL): People who showed an interest in a subscription plan by communicating directly with Rewaa.
- Closed deals: A person who subscribed to a plan.
Initially, we set up Maximise conversions bidding to generate more leads — anyone who clicked on an ad and filled out a form. This helped us generate the most clicks for a given budget, with the number of leads gathered being the main measure of success.
With more leads coming in, our cost per lead started to drop. Good on paper, but due to our significant drop in conversion rates, our cost per sales-qualified lead increased by 50%. This meant our leads weren’t of high quality.
When we looked deeper, we noticed that our bidding strategy — set to maximise the number of conversions — was optimising towards a lower cost-per-lead, regardless of quality. To optimise towards leads of higher quality — people more likely to actually buy — our approach had to change.
Decoding the customer journey to drive sales
Assembly MENA helped us kickstart the transformation by implementing Google Click Identifier parameters within our customer relationship management (CRM) system. This linked data between Google Ads and Google Analytics, allowing us to import and understand offline and digital conversions.
“In addition to regular leads, our team also created three new lead conversion goals on Google Ads: marketing-qualified leads, sales-qualified leads, and closed deals,” Assembly MENA Country Director for Saudi Arabia, Naguib Toihiri, explains.
Once a person completed a new step in the journey towards closing a deal, they were passed as a new conversion with a higher value to Google Ads. This allowed our campaign to give more weight to that person and optimise towards similar consumers.
“The third essential step was assigning an average monetary value to each conversion goal,” Toihiri adds. “We did this by using Rewaa’s past leads data to figure out how often leads turned into sales. With an assigned monetary value, the algorithm could prioritise conversions based on how people progressed through the conversion goals, and therefore, how likely they were to purchase a subscription plan. We started using these conversions as new measures of ad success.”
To encourage the ad campaign to optimise toward conversions with a higher value, we shifted budget to Maximise conversion value. This uses AI to optimise and set bids, and allows brands to define the value they want to maximise, such as sales revenue or profit margins.
Once a person completed a new step in the journey towards closing a deal, they were passed as a new conversion with a higher value to Google Ads. This allowed our campaign to give more weight to that person and optimise towards similar consumers.
From interest to action: Mastering the sales cycle
By adopting a data-driven approach and focusing on lead quality over quantity, we achieved exceptional results: a 96% increase in overall return on ad spend (ROAS) in just over a month. This was a direct result of the improvement in the quality of leads, as evidenced by an 80% increase in marketing-qualified lead conversions, an 89% increase in sales-qualified lead conversions, and a decrease of 45% in cost-per-sales-qualified leads. After seeing these incredible results, we shifted our entire account to Value-based bidding.
For businesses new to data-driven marketing, our success proves that they can rapidly advance their digital maturity by adopting more advanced techniques and embracing marketing strategies that harness data.