By properly integrating 6sense with Google ads, you can implement an account-based marketing strategy which will significantly improve performance and give you a leg up on your competition.
Google Ads allows you to promote your products and services when and where people are searching for them. Google receives over 5.6 billion searches per day and over 59% of shoppers use Google to research a product or service before purchasing.
Unfortunately, Google Ads provides few standalone capabilities for account-based marketing.
By properly integrating 6sense with Google ads, you can implement an account-based marketing strategy which will significantly improve performance and give you a leg up on your competition!
6sense attributes: Technographic and firmographic attributes of a website visitor generated through the 6signal API
Audiences: Previous visitors of your site categorized into groups based on 6sense attribute. Audiences are built in Google Analytics using custom dimensions that pull in the 6sense attributes. Link Google Analytics to Google Ads to use these audiences for the below opportunities.
Smart bidding: Smart Bidding is a subset of automated bid strategies that use machine learning to optimize for conversions or conversion value in each and every auction. Measurement is extremely important for the success of smart bidding.
How third-party data can be used: Third-party data can only be used to segment first-party audiences: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6242605
Minimum audience size:
This will allow Google to drive more visits from users with these attributes when using a Smart Bidding strategy.
Example: Track conversions for visits from users within ICP, strong profile fit, etc.
How: Use Google Tag Manager to fire a conversion event when a user comes to the site matching your criteria by utilizing the 6signal info.
This will allow Google Smart Bidding strategies to perform better by more accurately valuing conversion actions and driving more from your key audiences.
Example: If a user is within your ICP and signs up for a demo, multiply the value of that conversion by 3.
How: Build audiences in Google Analytics using custom dimensions that are populated by the 6sense attributes, particularly the 6sense segment. Then, setup conversion value rules in Google Ads.
This will improve the performance of Smart Bidding strategies as audiences are one of the signals utilized for bidding. It will also give you better ranking when valuable users search keywords that you are targeting.
Example: Increase your bid by 50% in a search auction for users that have previously been to your site and fall within your Ideal Customer Profile segment.
How: Build audiences in Google Analytics using custom dimensions that are populated by the 6sense attributes. Add audiences at the campaign or ad group level in Google Ads. If you are using a Smart Bidding strategy then you do not need to set bid adjustments for the audiences, however if you are using a manual bid policy then you must set appropriate bid adjustments.
Example: If you are targeting the keyword “accounting software” and someone searches this (who has been to the site) from the manufacturing industry (as defined by 6sense) your ad would read “accounting software for manufacturing companies”.
Example: If a user who has been to you site is in the “purchase” buying stage then use “Schedule Your Demo Today” in the ad copy and land them on the demo signup page.
How: Build audiences in Google Analytics using custom dimensions that are populated by the 6sense attributes. Apply the audience to an ad group in Google Ads using the “Targeting” setting. Customize ad copy respectively
Example: we saw that users driven through lead generation keywords were predominantly in the “awareness” buying stage so we adjusted our ad to send them to an informational video about how 6sense helps with lead gen.
How: Analyze keywords by buying stage in Google Analytics. Identify groups of keywords that skew towards specific buying stage and adjust ad copy/landing page appropriately.
Note: It would be optimal to adjust the content of the page based on their buying stage instead of making the decision at the keyword level as not all users searching for a keyword will be in a specific buying stage.
Example: Prevent previous site visitors from seeing and clicking your ads if they work at companies with annual revenues under $10 million.
Example: Prevent competitors who have been to your site from seeing or clicking your ad again.
Example: Prevent previous site visitors from seeing and clicking your ads if their profile fit is poor.
How: Build audiences in Google Analytics using custom dimensions that are populated by the 6sense attributes. Add these audiences as “excluded” within Google Ads.
This will allow you to profitably expand your reach.
Example: Your company sells account based marketing software but the keyword “marketing software” is too general and does not perform well. You can move this keyword to a campaign that only targets previous site visitors within your ICP.
Example: Use broad match versions of keywords only for users within your ICP.
How: Build high-value audiences in Google Analytics using custom dimensions that are populated by the 6sense attributes. Create a new campaign or ad group with the general keywords and add the high-value audiences as Targeted instead of Observation.
There could be valuable keywords being monitored in 6sense that aren’t being targeted in Google Ads, and vice versa.
Example: The keyword “CDP” is researched by most companies in your ICP yet you aren’t targeting it as a keyword in Google Ads.
How: This is currently a manual process that requires cooperation between the team managing 6sense and that managing paid search.
6sense opportunity: pull in keyword data from the Google Ads API and programmatically uncover opportunities within the 6sense platform.
Keywords does not dictate buying stage.
Account Based Measurement: buying teams are fragmented and large – often 10+ people. The problem with how we measure performance in Google Ads is that it’s based on what an individual does, not the company. We would have more accurate and a higher quantity of data if we could measure at the company level. Also, different buying stages have different goals so they should not all be measured the same.
Example: someone from Best Buy comes to the site via paid search and reads a few articles but doesn’t complete any valuable conversion actions. The next day a different person from Best Buy comes to the site via organic and signs up for a demo. We should be passing this information back into Google Ads to improve our bidding.
Incorporate search terms into buying stage calculation: 6sense should ingest Google and Bing Ads search term data to calculate a company’s buying stage more accurately. What a user searches in Google Ads is one of the purest forms of “intent” that exists. Based on my knowledge of 6sense, there are issues with the buying stage calculation when you drill down to what these companies searched on Google. There are a number of companies that have searched “6sense” multiple times but are still in the “Target” stage.
This info is super easy to pull from Google Analytics. It would be cool if 6sense could aggregate Google Ads search data across their clients to create a more complete view of what companies are searching for. May be some data privacy/ownership concerns…
Click tracking redirects: Fix the issue preventing us from using 6sense click-tracking redirects in Google Ads and Bing Ads. This would enable better understanding of value within the 6sense platform.
This functionality is also problematic because every landing page required a unique tracking redirect to be generated. It would be nice if we could use the same one for all ads like in other platforms.
Microsoft Ads company targeting: Create an integration with Microsoft (Bing) Ads that replicates the company targeting in 6sense for specified segments. Microsoft Ads allows you to target companies since Microsoft owns LinkedIn. You can’t target these companies specifically, but you can setup a campaign where the majority of traffic will be from your targeted companies.
Keywords ideas: Can we see which keywords companies in our ICP are searching even if they aren’t targeted? If so, these would be useful for keyword ideas in paid search.
Keyword categorization: it would be nice in 6sense if you could create keyword categories instead of having only two buckets; brand and generic. Coming from Google Ads I found the keyword process to be cumbersome and it seems like this would help with segment build-out.
Through the implementation of these tactics, you will increase engagement with high-value prospects and reduce spend on the low-value ones.
It will also put you in the small minority that have adopted an advanced ABM strategy in their Google Ads account.
This article was written by Jim Vaillancourt, owner of Lionhurst, a digital marketing agency with expertise in Google Ads and ABM. It was most recently updated on December 2nd, 2022.
Lionhurst manages Google Ads for 6sense. Lionhurst’s implementation of these tactics with 6sense has led to a large improvement in Google Ads performance.
I want to target all people at a certain company when they search “software” on Google.
This question, and similar iterations of it, are common. One of the most important concepts to understand with all of this is that third-party data (in this case, 6sense attributes) can only be used to segment first-party data for targeting on Google Ads. This is why most of the examples above cite “previous site visitors”. More information here.
The audience that I want to target is too small.
This is an unfortunate consequence of only being able to use third-party data to segment first-party data. Because search audiences need to be greater than 1000 users and display audiences need to be greater than 100 users, you can not get overly specific in your targeting.
How often do I need to update audiences?
Audiences that are built in Google Analytics are dynamic. When a new user comes to the site and matches the criteria for a specific audience then they are automatically added to it.