GR0 is pleased to announce that it has won the prestigious 2021 Search Engine Land award for “Best B2B Search Marketing Initiative – SEM” on behalf of its work with Credit Reporting Services (CRS Credit API).

The Search Engine Land Awards set out to celebrate individuals, agencies, and internal marketing teams within the digital marketing community who have demonstrated excellence in executing organic and paid search marketing campaigns and research initiatives.

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The LA-based marketing agency focuses mainly on SEO, but has recently built out a smaller SEM branch that is quickly gaining traction. The growing team works with DTC and B2B brands, helping them attract high-quality leads due to users qualifying which results they want to see via their keyword search. This strategy is completely passive – also considered “pull” marketing – achieving exciting results for brands, and especially B2B advertisers.

“Our clients’ success is how we measure our success in the PPC department at GR0 – we are extremely honored for our young department to be recognized for helping scale B2B leads for our client on PPC,” said GR0’s Co-Head of Google Ads Tyler Rhodes.

Rhodes’ Co-Head and partner Michael Uribe also stated: “We are incredibly honored to be receiving this award, and delighted to know that receiving it means that we did a great job for our client. By combining the power of Google Ads as a high-intent lead generation tool with a well-oiled sales system built out by our client, we were able to create a funnel for the business that enabled them to receive millions of dollars in funding after only 6 months of advertising.”

The “Best B2B Search Marketing Initiative – SEM” category recognizes the most successful campaign by internal teams, agencies or consultants running paid search campaigns across one or more search-based advertising platforms, demonstrating continuous improvement and a positive return on investment. Entrants must demonstrate success in paid search advertising efforts to improve visibility within paid results to drive sales, generate leads and/or convert new customers on major search platforms. To that end, GR0’s innovative approach achieved a 20x ROAS within the first two months of launching the CRS Credit API campaign, and has since climbed to over 130x lifetime ROAS within a year.

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Campaign Background

In October 2020, GR0’s SEM team was tasked with one of their first campaigns as a new minted department and was asked to help a disruptive B2B services company achieve scale on Google Ads. Credit Reporting Services (CRS Credit API) identified an opportunity to disrupt a stale B2B services industry – credit reporting for landlords, financial services companies, lending institutions, or virtually any business that is required to run an individuals’ credit report from the 3 major credit reporting bureaus.

The Challenge

This created a unique challenge for GR0’s SEM team due to the extremely limited search volume that exists around credit reporting software keywords – Although there is significant traffic flowing from consumer-credit queries, searches from CRS’s target customer (a large business that runs credit reports) are much less frequent.

In order to achieve scale on Google Ads, GR0 built granular, 3-5 keyword ad groups and prioritized exact match, applying aggressive negative keyword expansions on a near-daily basis to quell any irrelevant traffic spikes.

The Results

After just two months of optimizing their SEM, GR0 managed to increase SEM lead volume from 10 leads per month to 75 leads per month at a consistent close rate. As lead quality remained strong, CRS increased their budget – achieving scale at over 100 leads per month throughout 2021. In addition to pulling high-intent leads from extremely precarious search landscapes, the CRS B2B campaign was the highest ROAS B2B campaign that GR0 has ever executed with accurate conversion tracking in place. Due to the nature of credit reporting services, the campaign achieved a 20x ROAS within the first 2 months of launching, and have since climbed to over 130x lifetime ROAS at present.

Rhodes shared his final thoughts on the campaign: “What truly motivates and inspires us is knowing that the work that led to this award resulted in our B2B client raising a multimillion dollar funding round, citing our lead generation on Google Ads as a key contributing growth factor.”

The leading LA-based agency helps brands rank #1 on Google by leveraging search engine optimization and search engine marketing. For more information about GR0 and to read reviews related to client and employee feedback, please visit Comparably, Glassdoor, Clutch or Crunchbase.

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