Adriel AdOps | Ep03 | B2B Customer Journey, SKAG vs. Hagakure, Marketing dashboard comparisons

Hey there! Welcome to Adriel’s AdOps newsletter, where 6300+ marketers get some of our best insights on ad operations, digital marketing, and marketing automation every month in an easy-to-digest email format. 

Folks in the B2B space…

Dreamdata’s recent study revealed that an average B2B customer journey takes 192 days (6 months) to move from first-touch to won-deal.

Larger companies see 40% longer journeys with 242 days, and…

An average customer goes through 31 touches before making a purchase 😱

From first-touch to closed deal, this is how long the journey takes on average:

What does this all mean?

1. Investing in just one channel is no longer enough. With 31 touches, you need to be present across every touchpoint, or risk losing out on brand awareness and conversions. 

Run cross-channel retargeting campaigns, readjust budget, and A/B test your creatives for each channel. Invest in both paid and organic marketing. Consolidate your data across every channel on one marketing dashboard to save time and energy on tracking and reporting. 

2. Building a community is your #1 priority. Customer journeys where a Review Site is the first touch are 63% shorter than the average. Why? Simple – people trust others who have actually used the product more than anything else. 

Evangelists are the absolute core of any healthy business growth. And the best part? Word-of-mouth compounds for free. In the early stages, get as many people to try your product, and over-service them to keep them happy. We talk more about this in this piece from our Head of Growth - Samy Barbier. 

3. Treat social media as a brand building channel, not as a conversion channel. Social media ads are great for building an audience and sustaining long-term relationships–but it takes longer for prospects to purchase (222 days).

⚡Power Up Ad Operations: 3 Tips 

From creating ads to optimizing campaigns, adops can be incredibly time-consuming and mentally-taxing. Every month, we share tips and tricks in this section to make it just a little easier.

1) SKAG vs. Hagakure: Which is better for your Google Ads campaigns? SKAG is a Google Ads structure where a single keyword triggers a specific ad, while Hagakure is a newer approach focusing on combining keywords into broader themes. 

Which should you use to structure your Google Ads campaigns? Depends on your goals and budget. Some prefer SKAG because it reduces their reliance on Google’s often unreliable algorithms, while others prefer Hagakure because it’s more flexible and scalable. Here’s a summary:

Check out this article for a complete breakdown. 

2)💡Dashboard Tip: Group your ad data by performance using custom dimensions. Custom dimensions help you organize your pivot tables and make data-driven decisions to improve your ad campaigns.

Say you manage ads for a global property management group with five different locations. With custom dimensions, you can create a breakdown to see how each location performs holistically, helping you optimize your ad campaigns.

On Adriel, you can group ads, ad sets, campaigns, and more using filters and custom breakdowns to view performance in a more organized way. These breakdowns include data source, name, ID, or other differentiators.

3)💡Design Tip: Use donut charts to represent simple part-to-whole relationships.

Donut charts are great for visualizing data that can be broken down into distinct categories or segments, where the relationship between each segment and the total is of primary interest. Some examples are: 

• Market Share
• Customer Segmentation
• Budget Allocation
• Product Sales by Category
• Conversions
• Ad Performance

📖 What digital marketers are buzzing about

1) In the hunt for a marketing dashboard or thinking about switching? Here’s a cost breakdown of 17 most popular marketing dashboards in the market. Grab ready-to-go dashboard templates and find some dashboard design inspos in the same article!

2) 79% of marketers are planning to integrate more AI into their strategies this year according to new research from Wpromote and Ascend.

Marketers plan to use AI mostly for personalizing the customer experience, as AI algorithms can analyze historical data and identify patterns that are useful in customer segmentation, predictive analytics, and lead scoring.

3) Open up the gates! The future is “no form”. Today’s consumers are privacy-savvy—they’re less likely to give up their emails for gated content. Anna Tutt, CMO of Oort, goes as far to argue that traditional B2B marketing forms will be obsolete in the future. Instead, she advises these 6 alternate strategies:

1️⃣Move any demo request/schedule calls to calendaring tools instead of forms.

2️⃣ Ungate your content. Instead, get as many eyeballs on your content as possible, eliminate friction, and provide a better experience with your brand.

3️⃣ Leverage intent tools and website deanonymizers to identify accounts in the market and stop your overreliance on BOFU form submissions. 

4️⃣Provide the option to sign in using social accounts–this eliminates the need for dedicated landing pages & forms.

5️⃣Prospects know very well what you’re doing with their emails. Focus on building trust and familiarity with your brand instead of asking for emails.

6️⃣ Change your way of thinking about traditional marketing attribution.

🔦Behind the Adriel Team

WHO: Eric Ngo
ROLE: Growth Manager

Eric is a dashboard and data pro at Adriel. He makes sure clients are happy with their dashboards and he's constantly developing new features that would make their lives easier. Find out more ⬇️

1. Can you tell us more about your role at Adriel?  

I’m on the support side of Client Success Management so I help clients set up their connections and dashboards and resolve whatever issues they might have. I also have a technical background (two former jobs in IT!) so I help clients blend and track data any way they want. I’m also in-charge of developing product tours and templates, and tweaking and improving our website. 

2. What do clients like best about Adriel?

The ability to blend data is a true game-changer. We’re able to help clients manipulate their marketing data any way they want to get deeper insights. It’s pretty powerful! 

Clients also love being able to customize their dashboards (not just reports) with our styling features. There’s a lot of flexibility on Adriel and that’s something not all solutions can say. 

We’re also able to develop new features pretty quickly and our clients appreciate that. Sometimes it’s not about one specific feature, but about how a solution can be reactive and fast when it comes to developing new features and fixing issues. 

3. What’s something you love most about your job? 

The fact that we’re a startup and there are endless opportunities to build anything I want that would benefit our users. I’m excited to explore the full potential of marketing data, and create new features that didn’t exist before.

But more than anything, I love helping clients, even if they have complicated requests sometimes. It’s in my nature to help people the best I can!

4. What do you like to do in your free time?

I like sports! I go to the gym four times a week  👀💪I also love languages, and I’m learning Korean right now.

I also started playing Dungeons and Dragons two months ago with some French people, and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since!