SurveyMonkey
Alli Bidding to ROI Drives Higher
Lifetime Value Subscriptions
As the world’s most popular online survey tool, SurveyMonkey has attracted users because of the platform’s ease of use and robust features. Acquiring users and generating subscriptions, however, had been financially challenging for the technology company. Because the team managing their digital campaigns did not have a view of actual revenue, they were able to use only rudimentary bidding approaches that did not focus spend on the most profitable audiences. PMG took over management of the brand’s SEM program and by utilizing Alli, quickly turned it into an important driver of high-value subscriptions and revenue.
Services
40%
Increase in revenue
87%
Higher ROI
50%
Reduced CPL by
Challenge
SurveyMonkey had been unable to optimize its digital campaigns effectively because its Floodlight pixel passed revenue in local currency, rendering revenue data worthless since conversions happened with more than 60 types of currencies globally. Beyond that roadblock, SurveyMonkey’s SEM campaigns suffered from time-consuming and error-prone manual bidding that did not allow the marketer to frequently adjust bid modifiers such as locations, audiences, and devices. Due to those issues, SurveyMonkey had been unable to truly go after higher-value enterprise-level business customers who produced higher lifetime value.
Strategy & Approach
In order to maximize profits for SurveyMonkey’s SEM investment, PMG settled on a strategy to push into areas that drive higher value packages, benefiting the brand both in the short-term through improved ROI as well as in the long-term through higher retention rates.
Our first and most critical step was to figure out how to optimize to ROI in the absence of revenue values. The account team worked closely with PMG’s data innovation team to import package values into Alli and leverage the marketing intelligence platform to devise a revenue formula. The formula’s factors included conversions by package tier, the price per tier, and other attributes, which gave us a critical proxy for revenue.
We validated the approach through an initial test that reached the US and UK markets, and we then used that Alli data source and matched it with core spend data, allowing us to implement Alli Actions for Bidding.
Results
PMG’s approach for the US and UK delivered amazing results in SEM for SurveyMonkey, driving an increase in revenue by 40% after implementation. In addition to the topline impact, profits also grew significantly, as ROI skyrocketed 87% with automated bidding helping to reduce or eliminate spend on lower-value conversions. As a result, our CPL dropped by half. Based on the company’s ROI goal, PMG was able to exceed the plan by 53%, opening the SEM program for additional investment and driving more high-value customer acquisitions. Due to the tremendous success, SurveyMonkey greenlit a global rollout of the approach, which yielded equally impressive increases in ROI and revenue.