How does one determine the value of a form fill, PDF download, or simply interacting with your website? What about MQL and SQL actions? These are all tough questions without the concrete answers that are provided to our eCommerce friends.
I’ll outline two strategies that can help you dive deeper into assigning value to different stages of the funnel. As you gather more information, you’ll be able to modify things based on your findings.
Why Weight Conversions
Weighting conversions forces you to think through your conversion process, all with one goal in mind: drive higher value interactions and ultimately increase the number of qualified people going through the sales funnel.
An easy way to start is thinking about conversion action sets in Google Ads and how each action ultimately contributes to your end goal. We take the next step here. Assigning value to each particular action, rather than broader strokes across the account.
There are a couple of ways to go about setting conversion weights up. At some point, you’re going to have to go with your best guess because there likely won’t be enough data to work with.
Average Value
We’ll start with the plan of action most grounded in reality. If you have data involving the sales cycle (MQL -> SQL -> Opportunity -> Closed Deal), this is a great place to start. You can do some simple math to work backwards based on how many people progress from one stage to another and a deal closed value.
Here is a simple example based on an average deal value of $10,000.
We can begin to assign a value based on the number of MQLs it takes to generate one deal.
From there, you can start value numbers to each action. By using a Max Conv. Value strategy, you’ll be able to optimize towards higher value actions. Gone are the days of Target CPA weighting an MQL the same as an SQL.
If you don’t have quite the clarity into deal size, the next option is for you. You may also employ a hybrid based on actions that are harder to track (video views, browsing high value pages, etc)
Weighting Based on Importance
Without an order value or knowledge of funnel progression grounding you, there is a lot more uncertainty. We can still make some educated guesses based on experience to provide clarity to ourselves and Google. We know not every action is created equally, so simply assign a value that aligns to the importance.
This simple structure tells Google that you value an SQL 5x as much as an MQL. Something that extreme may detriment your MQL generation so it’s a reminder that these numbers are a guess. You’ll want to pay close attention to the impact.
Final Thoughts
One final important piece of this shift is attribution. By using position based or data driven, you’ll begin to have greater clarity into which keywords are ultimately driving downstream revenue. Effectively, you’ll be teaching yourself and Google who the most likely to progress down the funnel is. That helps put a greater emphasis on quality conversions, rather than the quantity.
These two strategies are meant as a starting point. You’ll likely need to tweak and modify based on your data, the goals, and all sorts of other one off decisions. I urge you to begin thinking about it and evolve the strategy over the course of the year.
