The Solution

Our first order of business was to clean up all the apparent inefficiencies in the account. These measures included making appropriate adjustments across segments, ad groups and keywords, geography, and device types. We also closed up gaps or leaks produced by certain keywords by pausing egregious offenders that generated a lot of clicks and ate up a lot of costs but drove very few conversions. For the apparent winners, we boosted their bids and therefore average ad positions substantially in order to consolidate our position in the “money” keywords. The negative keyword list in the shared library was bolstered substantially and applied across all of the active campaigns in order to eliminate waste on some obviously irrelevant queries, like those related to employment or customer service. Missing ad extensions were also rolled out in order to make the greatest use of AdWords’ allowable ad real estate. In the second phase, we worked on bringing the landing page up to par with modern practice and demanding user expectations. This meant creating a clean, intuitive, no-fuss, conversion-optimized landing page that had as its central tenets: unambiguous communication of Datadog’s differentiators and benefits as well as easy signing up new customers and capturing leads. This effort, combined with tagging all URLs with custom tracking parameters, created a robust, end-to-end loop that allowed us to convert, engage, and remarket to our users much more effectively. In the final phase, we launched completely new campaigns to supplement the modified legacy campaigns in order to capture additional traffic that fell between the cracks of the then-extant keyword paradigm. In particular, we built completely new campaigns around individual technologies and integrations that enjoyed much lower than account-wide average CPAs, due to their specificity and relevance. Overall, this represented tens of new campaigns, with scores of new ad groups and keywords under each one. We also worked closely with the Datadog marketing team to write up ads that were relevant and specific to each integration and technology, thereby ensuring optimal quality scores. Lastly, we reconfigured the existing remarketing campaigns with new banners and increased our exposure throughout the Google Display Network with intelligently chosen placements that guaranteed a good return.