How we helped Lokalise achieve 250% growth in trial conversions.

-90%

decrease in Facebook CPA

-21%

decrease in Bing CPA

+229%

growth in trials from Google

About Lokalise

Lokalise is a cloud-based localization and translation management system for agile teams. It helps growth-minded businesses expand their mobile apps, games, software or digital content into multiple languages.

The company has clients all over the globe—including industry leaders like Hyundai, Mastercard, Starbucks, and other similar leading brands.

The challenge

Lokalise had already set the foundation for their Demand Generation initiatives in Google ads. They were also actively utilizing their organic channels with blog posts, how-to guides, case studies, and more. However, they struggled to increase trials on their platform with paid media ads.

Looking for an experienced marketing partner, Lokalise came to Hey Digital to scale up their account for growth and meet their goals of increasing the number of new and returning customers.

Thus, they looked for a solution that would drive an increase in their overall trials across Google, Facebook, Bing and LinkedIn while keeping the Cost per Trial under control.

Our approach

For us, the challenge of generating demand for every new SaaS offering is a great opportunity to unlock growth for them and hone our battle-tested expertise from practice.

With tailored creatives, structured funnel-based campaigns and high-intent targeting, Hey Digital worked closely with Lokalise and managed to increase new trials using Google, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora and YouTube paid advertising channels.

Below you may find the key strategies we have implemented across Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Bing ads to boost trial signups by over 250%.

Google Ads

Manual bid management script

With automated bid strategies, the campaigns worked well at an early stage, but as we progressed with multiple themed keyword groups, we saw an increase in CPC in established keyword groups.

By enabling manual CPC bidding strategy for high-cost and low-performing general campaigns, the costs to acquire trials reduced drastically. We also utilized an automated bid management script that updated keyword bids to achieve the set target cost per trial set for each campaign group (categorized for individual funnel - high, medium and bottom intent campaign groups).

This helped us decrease the rise in CPC caused from automated bid strategies like Target CPA and Max Conversions.

Drive sales pipeline and
revenue for your B2B SaaS

Have strong product-market fit? Get high-quality signups and demos that convert into customers and opportunities—all with paid marketing.

Schedule a call

Restructuring the campaigns

As we scaled the budgets, Hey Digital and Lokalise teamed up in tackling the rising CPA by restructuring the campaigns to include all match types within the same ad groups, instead of having them in separate campaigns/ad groups.

The campaigns were grouped from 22 regions into 6 country tiers to increase the search volume for the keywords and manage budget more effectively. With this experiment, wemanaged to reduce 50% of CPA from Google ads in a span of 2 months.

Negative Keywords

Everything matters in Google Ads—even the things that may seem trivial at first, like changing the individual campaign settings, scheduling the campaigns to run on weekdays and so on.

So, to improve the campaign’s health, we rigorously updated negative keywords from search queries to maximize our intent match, which further drove an increase in conversions.

Thus, a tailored manual bid management script, the new campaign structure, and close monitoring of negative keywords increased trial registrations generated from Google Ad campaigns by 229%.

Facebook Ads

Challenge with conversion tracking

In Facebook Ads, Lokalise were running engagement based campaigns, which were driving traffic from interest based audiences. By teaming up with Lokalise, we realigned the campaigns to optimize for trials with personalized copies, tailored ad creatives, and by targeting interest based campaigns.

However, the trial volume we received was still not satisfactory. So, we started diagnosing the conversion setup which wasn’t delivering proper triggers after a recent website change. We then identified the root cause and fixed the triggers in Google Tag Manager. When tested, we started getting a good number of conversions.

By optimizing towards the right conversion event, we doubled the trials from interest based campaigns. And with lookalike campaigns, our trial numbers went off the charts with an overall growth of 1994% for an increase in spend of 116% compared to the previous period. To mention, there was a significant spend increase as well to make this achievable.

Bing Ads

Utilizing lower CPCs on Bing

Although Bing search campaigns are a perfect replication of Google search campaigns, we faced unique challenges and opportunities in Bing. One such opportunity was that Bing ads had a much lower CPC, which we then capitalized on to get the most out of it.

However, the volume of the queries were not as significant as Google search. As we pushed the campaigns by including more middle funnel integration based keywords, Bing campaigns started scaling up started scaling up and as a result the trial volume increased significantly. There were 2x major wins here, the increase in trial volume increased exponentially more than the percentage increase in budget and our CPA actually reduced by 21%.

Results

Lokalise grabbed the opportunity to optimize for conversions by increasing their ad spend and making the most out of their campaign.

Thus, with Lokalise buying more exposure and the combined efforts of the team at Hey Digital, they were able to surpass their goal, achieving a whopping 1994% increase in Facebook decreasing cost per trial by 90%, 229% increase in trials from Google, 1870% increase in trials from Bing for a proportionate 1458% increase in cost, and 250% growth in overall signups.