Advice Needed: Optimizing Google Ads Conversion Setup for B2B DevOps/IT/Security Product
Hey Reddit, I’m hoping for some insights on improving my Google Ads conversion setup.
Current Setup:
Google Ads event fires on lead submission alongside a GA4 event.
Uploading offline conversions for MQLs, SQLs, and Opportunities.
Currently optimizing toward maximizing conversions with a target CPA.
Performance Issue:
Cost per MQL is around $1,500 USD, which seems higher than it could be.
Conversion Goals in Google Ads:
Primary goal includes the initial lead submission event + 3 offline events (MQL, SQL, Opportunity).
Context:
Product is B2B in the DevOps/IT/Security space.
Average deal size is around $10K USD.
Sales cycle ranges from 1 week to 1 month.
Currently only assigning value to Opportunities, but considering grading MQLs into 4 tiers and assigning calculated values.
Questions:
What’s the most effective way to structure conversions and optimize for better efficiency?
Would you recommend assigning values to all funnel stages, or only to certain key stages?
Any general advice or best practices for optimizing this type of B2B conversion setup?
Appreciate any expertise and guidance!
The short answer is:
You should simplify your Google Ads primary conversion goal to focus on the highest-intent, high-volume offline event you’re willing to pay $1,500 USD for, likely the MQL stage, and then assign calculated, differentiated values to all subsequent funnel stages including MQL, SQL, and Opportunity.
This provides the bidding algorithm with more high-volume, quality signals faster than waiting for the final Opportunity stage, allowing it to optimize more efficiently and drive down your Cost per MQL.
Using the Google Ads API for automated, frequent offline conversion uploads, ideally daily, combined with Google Tag Manager and a server-side tagging solution like Stape or Google Cloud Platform, is a highly recommended and relatively cheap solution to ensure data quality and speed, which is crucial for B2B long sales cycles.
The long answer is:
Your Cost per MQL of around $1,500 USD is high, especially considering your average deal size is $10K USD, implying your expected return on ad spend at the MQL level is low or negative unless your MQL-to-Opportunity conversion rate is incredibly high.
The primary issue is likely that your Google Ads Smart Bidding strategy is trying to optimize for a conversion goal that is too far down the funnel and has too low a volume to learn quickly- the combined primary goal of the initial lead submission plus three offline events is overly complex and dilutes the signal.
What you should do is create a simplified, high-volume primary conversion action, which should be the highest-quality, most frequently occurring offline event you’re willing to pay a premium for, which in your case is the MQL.
Change your primary Google Ads conversion goal to only the MQL offline conversion event.
The initial lead submission is typically too low quality and high volume to serve as a meaningful optimization goal in this B2B context.
You must, however, ensure you are tracking all subsequent funnel stages – SQL and Opportunity – as secondary conversion actions with assigned values, which brings us to the next point.
You absolutely should assign calculated values to all funnel stages: MQL, SQL, and Opportunity.
Currently only assigning a value to the Opportunity is preventing the algorithm from seeing the value differential in the leads you’re generating until weeks or months later.
The MQL, SQL, and Opportunity stages should each have a calculated value based on a weighted average of your final average deal size ($10K) multiplied by the conversion rate from that stage to a final closed-won deal.
For example, if your SQL to Closed-Won rate is 10 percent, your SQL value should be $1,000 USD (10% of $10K).
Then, if your MQL to SQL rate is 20 percent, your MQL value would be $200 USD (20% of $1,000).
You could even use your four-tier MQL grading to assign four different values to MQL, providing an even richer signal for the bidding algorithm.
This is called value-based bidding.
Once you implement this, switch your bidding strategy from Target CPA to a value-based strategy like Maximize Conversion Value with a Target ROAS.
This shift is the most effective way to optimize for better efficiency, as the algorithm will begin to chase the leads it predicts will generate the highest value for you.
To make this work with your short 1-week to 1-month sales cycle and ensure the Smart Bidding algorithm gets the freshest data, you need to automate your offline conversion imports.
Manual file uploads from your CRM are slow and introduce data lag, which cripples Smart Bidding performance.
Using the Google Ads API for direct or near-real-time upload of your MQL, SQL, and Opportunity events is the best practice.
You can use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to collect the gclid (Google Click ID) from the lead submission and pass it to your CRM.
The combination of the Google Ads API for the upload, the gclid collection via GTM, and a server-side solution like Stape or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for hosting your tagging is an excellent and cost-effective solution.
Server-side tagging through Stape or GCP allows you to have a single, owned point of data collection and transformation, making it simpler to send clean, first-party data, including the gclid, to your CRM and then back to Google Ads via the API.
Stape offers a budget-friendly option compared to full GCP deployment for server-side tagging, and using the Google Ads API for automated uploads is often cheaper and more reliable than many third-party connector tools, as the API usage itself is typically free, only incurring costs related to the infrastructure you use to run the script or application (like a cheap cloud function or Stape’s services).
The speed and accuracy of this automated data flow is critical to turning your $1,500 MQLs into more profitable $200 MQLs by giving the algorithm the feedback it needs to find better quality prospects.
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