How Slack’s Marketing Team Revamped Its Paid Search Strategy

Paid search campaigns are a digital promoting technique the place firms pay to seem in search engine outcomes to drive focused visitors to their web site. Search development is a numbers sport: you want steady key phrase identification and testing to enhance efficiency.

Whereas optimizing paid search is a prime precedence for a lot of advertising and marketing groups — in any case, it accounts for 39.5% of the digital promoting market share, greater than another promoting format — they typically lack the sources to maximise its influence. Groups typically juggle managing 1000’s of key phrases, campaigns and advert variations each single day. Restricted sources, handbook processes, disconnected knowledge sources and competing priorities typically hamper development.

At Salesforce, our Slack advertising and marketing group got down to discover a higher method. They wished to transcend the key phrase instruments offered inside Google Adverts, the place the vast majority of their paid search actions occur, to make genuine connections and get probably the most worth. (Google dominates the search promoting market within the US with a 50.5% share of US search advert spending.) Since Slack solves a broad spectrum of use instances, the group regarded to uncover a bigger record of key phrases that resonate with their prospects.

Discover ways to optimize paid search campaigns

Going to Dreamforce? Sara Fefferman and Jivesh Upadhyay of Salesforce will stroll you thru this Slack use case on October 15.

Their reply? Agentforce. Onerous-to-scale duties like key phrase growth and paid search optimization are a wonderful match for agentic options. The group constructed a customized agent to assist them optimize their paid search. The paid search agent makes use of the Salesforce Platform to determine new key phrases for current and new campaigns.  The consumer interfaces with the ends in their movement of labor (which on this case is straight in Slack, after all) and organizes them for marketing campaign use in only a few prompts. 

For instance, if a marketer needs to construct on the success they’ve seen for key phrases associated to “collaboration,” the agent might determine and pull efficiency knowledge for comparable phrases, comparable to “teamwork.” They’ll take a look at these by utilizing search engine optimisation and SEM insights. This goes past a easy key phrase match. It’s a complicated understanding of associated ideas that the Slack group can simply use to check new key phrases.

The Slack advertising and marketing group has simplified and streamlined their optimization course of by letting Agentforce determine new high-potential key phrases, scale their velocity of testing and optimization, improve web site visitors and in the end drive extra conversions.

 “Key phrase analysis may be an fruitful train, but it surely’s very time consuming,” says Josh Odenheimer, Director, Development Advertising, Slack. “Given we’re a small group, we don’t get to run this train as typically correctly achieved. The paid search agent solves this by slicing down the time to run this train, surfaces insights quicker, and permits us to in the end take motion extra often.” 

How Slack constructed a customized agent for Slack

Let’s dive into the precise Salesforce platform instruments the group used to to construct their customized agent:

• Advertising Intelligence. Orchestrates the information, connecting, mapping and reworking search knowledge into Information Cloud with marketing-specific API conectors and Semantic Information Mannequin.
• Information Cloud. Powers the Salesforce Platform and delivers trusted, contextual knowledge for Agentforce to activate real-time insights and clever motion.
• Agentforce. Manages the movement of actions, discovering related key phrases, analyzing knowledge sources, compiling strategies and refining outputs primarily based on conversational prompts.
• Slack. The agent is initiated in Slack. As soon as the information is available in, it publishes the information as a desk right into a slack canvas, consolidated in a single place. 

How Slack consolidated knowledge administration with Advertising Intelligence

The Slack group managed their knowledge with Advertising Intelligence, the next-generation of promoting analytics constructed on the Salesforce platform. It automates knowledge administration by simplifying the ingestion, transformation and mapping from third-party sources. The Slack advertising and marketing group was in a position to join their knowledge sources utilizing pre-built connectors known as Information Pipelines into Information Cloud seamlessly with Advertising Intelligence.

Step one was to determine and consolidate out there knowledge. Not like channels comparable to SMS, electronic mail, or WhatsApp, paid search knowledge doesn’t stay straight inside the Salesforce platform.  So, the group wanted to discover a technique to ingest their Google Adverts knowledge into Information Cloud to make it accessible to the agent.

The Slack group introduced in knowledge from:

1. Google Search Console, offering invaluable SEO (search engine optimisation) knowledge, or natural search insights.
2. Google Adverts, delivering granular, keyword-level paid search knowledge.
3. Google Analytics, monitoring internet visitors generated by each paid and natural sources.
4. BrightEdge, for market developments insights, competitor methods, and content material efficiency.

To construct their search optimization technique, they targeted on:

1. Understanding natural key phrases and their efficiency
2. Analyzing internet visitors to determine optimization alternatives for desired outcomes
3. Gaining deep insights from Google Adverts knowledge, together with spend and different essential KPIs

We’ve mixed the facility of Advertising Intelligence with advert publishing knowledge and delivered it straight in Slack. Prospects now not must piece collectively efficiency throughout platforms – they get a unified, data-driven view that helps minimize wasted spend, uncover excessive ROI alternatives and act on them immediately of their on a regular basis workspace.

Janani Narayanan, Senior Director, Product Administration – Digital Intelligence Automation at Salesforce

Why you want a semantic mannequin for achievement

A semantic mannequin was important to successfully combine these knowledge sources to reply strategic questions. Salesforce’s unified knowledge layer, Tableau Semantics, supplies enterprise context to knowledge throughout the platform. 

Advertising Intelligence gives a pre-built semantic knowledge mannequin in Tableau Semantics, particularly for advertising and marketing. This mannequin connects third-party sources like Google Adverts to particular knowledge classes, automating the transformation, mapping, and modeling into the semantic mannequin, a historically technical, handbook, and time-consuming duties. 

The Advertising Intelligence pre-built knowledge mannequin combines knowledge from varied advertising and marketing sources to calculate key metrics like Price Per Click on (CPC) and Click on-Via Fee (CTR), important for evaluating key phrase and advert group efficiency. 

This was a big benefit for the group constructing the client Slack Agent, as builders had been accustomed to utilizing Structured Question Language (SQL) for becoming a member of tables, a technique that will have resulted in a inflexible, difficult-to-scale answer restricted to particular questions.

Finally, Advertising Intelligence offered a number of essential advantages:

• Accelerated knowledge preparation: It streamlined the method of getting knowledge into the best form, providing a versatile basis to reply numerous advertising and marketing questions.
• Automated knowledge administration: Advertising Intelligence dealt with knowledge ingestion, modeling, and mapping with the Semantic Layer – eradicating vital growth effort. This allowed the builders to focus their experience on constructing the agent’s actions and its integration with Slack.
• Enhanced scalability and customization: Whereas Advertising Intelligence was half of a bigger answer, it considerably lowered growth effort and time, resulting in a extra scalable and customizable agent.

Through the use of the best tech stack, the group efficiently constructed a customized agent that’s straightforward to work together with in Slack, surfacing new key phrases to check from one supply, to allow them to act rapidly and scale their efforts to optimize their paid search technique.

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