How Relatel made their growth profitable with Dreamdata
In this case you'll get an introduction to:
Lifetime tracking: Turning anonymous traffic into revenue generated in CRM
Adwords: Splitting branded keywords from new lead campaigns for better performance transparency
Facebook Ads: From loss to traction channel
KPI’s: Unified business KPI’s that align across departments
Cohorts: Some channels generate a better Lifetime value than others
Relatel is a Danish telco, owned by the TDC group that offers a range of handy telco-related services to businesses, mainly in Denmark.
Their CEO, Peter Engelbrecht, reached out to Dreamdata as he wanted to move from somewhat knowing what drove their stable growth, to knowing, with data, what drove (and could hopefully accelerate) their growth.
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“Since founding Relatel 8 years ago, we’ve grown into a modern, digital telco with thousands of customers.Superior customer support, along with digital ads and a lot of calls has been our recipe for growth. As we’ve scaled, so has the complexity of our business.
Brand nowadays plays a big role in our revenue growth. This makes return on ad spend more fuzzy and harder to see clear cut effects from.
When reaching out to Dreamdata my goal was to go from guessing to knowing. From vanity to revenue.”
As Relatel is a born-digital telco, they have been generating data and touch-point for years.
Their challenge was that the data had never been consolidated and cleaned in one shared place. This inevitably led to the discussion: Whose opinion and data is more correct?
Naturally each department (sales, marketing, support, product) will be prone to trust their own data a bit more than their neighbors. Very fair, as that is what you know best.
But what actual drove Relatel’s growth and success?
What you measure is what you get
With hopes of more growth, Relatel have tried collaborations with performance marketing related agencies that resulted in a massive amounts of emails gathered.
The performance agency would fairly celebrate the campaigns as successes. Why wouldn't they? They were measured on how many leads they could generate.
Relatel however would anticipatingly watch the leads go through the marketing automation sequences and business development calls, only to find out that all these leads really was not worth a lot of revenue. 😫
A common problem B2B companies face is that there’s almost always time between money spent and revenue received.
It’s rare that a business purchases a product from another business on first sight. In fact, you could state: It never happens. Forget about it.
When you’re operating in the B2B world, you’re bound to struggle associating visitors on your website with revenue generated at a later point in time. A B2B transaction takes multiple touches and impressions.
This makes it hard to justify spending on ads, content as well as other marketing activities.
This results in a lot of B2B’s growing slower than what they actually could be doing.
Getting the paid channel back on track
As indicated earlier Relatel had begun to struggle with getting to a clearly positive ROI on paid ads as they scaled their spend.
Their brand played a bigger and bigger role, the performance marketing agency, not really getting what really mattered to Relatel and competition for the relevant clicks is ever intensified by competitors. Damn diminishing returns.
Dreamdata’s main solution to Relatels challenge has been two-fold:
Integrating all the available revenue-related touch-points into one database and subsequently joining, cleaning and preparing it for analysis.
Enabling full funnel, holistic tracking that follows anonymous businesses and people that visited the Relatel website and all the way until they become revenue noted in their CRM.
The latter is particularly important to understand the impact of paid ads performance.
Relatels tracking-foundation was fixed. With the help of Segment-tracking and Dreamdata’s ability to track the customer journey of one company buying a product/service from another company, things started to improve.
According to Relatels Chief Commercial Officer Pernille Solvig Graux:
“Dreamdata has made it possible for us to state, with confidence: This ad campaign has never resulted in actual measurable revenue, let’s shut it down. Let’s instead spend the money on new experiments, based on the things that we can see, with data, actually leads to revenue.
The whole team has access to our Dreamdata account and there they easily understand which campaigns drive revenue or not. That’s very valuable for me as CCO to be able to say. A pure game-changer.”
Adwords Without Brand Searches
Honest performance marketers will tell you the best way to hide your bad ad performance is to include branded searches in your client/business reports.
Pernille Solvig Graux, Chief Commercial Officer at Relatel, continues:
“Branded keywords that drive traffic is nice. It means your brand is known and probably appreciated. If you see a surge in branded searches it’s probably even a sign that traction is picking up. This means, the stuff you’re doing to create growth is most likely working.
That’s all fine. So far so good.
What branded keywords can’t give you is new traction and leads. There’s not unlimited amounts of people searching for your brand. You quickly end up having bought all the traffic possible from searches on your brand name.”
So where do you then go to find traction?
You start buying Adwords traffic on keywords that are relevant for your business. The closer to a purchase of your product, the better, one might add.
As your desire, and perhaps pressure, to grow revenue continues to scale, you end up buying traffic on keywords further and further away from a purchase of your product.
Now it gets harder. The math does not look as pretty anymore.
Perhaps you can still prove some return on investment. Perhaps you have moved to vanity measurements like emails gathered or something else.
To tackle this challenge Dreamdata made a simple selection option for Relatel. Select whether you want to view all campaigns, only branded campaigns or only non-branded campaigns.
This disclosed a lot of interesting insights. As expected the branded searches performed. Very well, actually. Relatel got a 50 to 1 ratio back on their ads purchase.
The non-branded campaigns though, struggled to just reach profitability as a whole. To be expected, some would argue, along the lines of spend money to make money. Fair enough.
The smart tinkerer will then ask, which campaigns do actually deliver proveable revenue then?
To put spotlight on this Dreamdata built an overview of all Google ads campaigns. The ad campaign overview pulled together insights from multiple relevant sources to present the insights a B2B marketer would need to evaluate ads:
Cost for the campaign
Impressions
Cost per click
Cost versus attributed revenue
Attributable deals per campaign
Attributable revenue per campaign
Relatel went through an analysis of all their double-digit campaigns running to firstly find the outliers and act on those.
What looked particularly profitable? And if particularly profitable, can we buy more traffic on this campaign? Can we do similar campaigns? And vice versa; What looks particularly not-profitable? Let’s shut it down! Is there a pattern here, we need to understand it?
As most marketers would admit, Adwords is a continued trial and error process. Set up experiments. See how they do. Learn. Try again.
Dreamdata provided the missing link between anonymous adwords traffic and revenue noted in the CRM, which enabled Relatel to understand the profitability of their B2B adwords.
Facebook Ads From Vanity To Revenue
Like a lot of other B2B companies, Relatel have started to experiment with Facebook ads as a way to drive growth. However the Facebook ads manager, despite spend, did not show a lot of revenue generated by Facebook ads. It showed a lot of leads gathered, but no revenue.
The performance marketing agency would obviously argue that they signed up a lot of lead-emails. That should be good, right?
The branded searches in Google could perhaps also be expected to increase as a result of this Facebook advertising.
The result remained. Almost no attributable revenue came from Relatels first attempts with Facebook ads could be proven in their Dreamdata account.
The Relatel marketing went back to the drawing board. They shut down their Facebook ad spent for a month to consider their options. The conclusion was: Let’s give it another shot.
They took another look at the few campaigns that had proveable revenue associated. They looked at the campaigns that did not provide revenue at all. And then they came back for round 2. New creatives, target groups and call-to-actions.
Their hard and thoughtful work paid off!
The following quarter they hit a 1 to 1 revenue versus spend ratio. That’s a massive improvement. From almost recording zero attributable revenue in the quarter before - And the cohorts aren’t even close to done generating revenue for Relatel.
Relatel are now back for even more improvement.
The marketing team has run another learning loop.
What worked? What did not work?
New creatives, target groups and call-to-actions. Trial and error. Forward.
We can’t wait to follow their journey towards nailing even more revenue from their ad spend.
Unifying Business KPI’s
Just before we finish. A few more Dreamdata-value-nuggets.
As part of the process towards becoming more datadriven Relatel have now established monthly Dreamdata reports.
The report unifies their whole business and ensures that everybody is aligned and focus on the same numbers that really matter. No more silos. A holistic look at what drives revenue, from an objective data point of view.
Final Remarks
The opportunities of what can be done with your cleaned B2B data within Dreamdata is abundant. Relatel get’s a lot of inspiration from following revenue cohorts from different perspectives.
We probably also have to admit, that this case shows, that Dreamdata, in all humbleness, is proud of our collaboration with Relatel.
In our opinion, it gives an introduction how much good you can do for your business when your revenue-related B2B data is cleaned and valuable analysis are made.
That said, you go nowhere without taking action on the insights you get.
Relatel has indeed used the insights to improve themself.
Well done. We look forward to continue your growth journey. 📊🚀