Google Data Studio builds better leads for French modular space company

Sixty years ago, Algeco pioneered the concept of modular buildings. The French company, now part of the Algeco Scotsman group, knows well how to quickly deliver additional space to schools, office buildings, and construction sites, or how to create quick modular spaces for restaurants, stores, and even high-end living. What it needed was an understanding of modern marketing technology to drive new client acquisition.

For that, it turned to AWE, an insights-minded digital marketing agency that specializes in B2B clients, and one that’s been a certified agency with Google since 2003 and a Google Marketing Platform Partner since 2010. By connecting its advertising with Google and Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) system in Google Data Studio, AWE was able to show Algeco exactly how its advertising with Google was driving client acquisition, shifting Algeco’s strategy from a cost-per-lead approach to a cost-per-contract model — and transforming its own approach to digital marketing in the process.

AWE, which initially used its own proprietary software to connect click to contract, switched to Google Analytics. As it familiarized itself with Data Studio and BigQuery, Google's fully managed analytics data warehouse, AWE came to believe that it could switch to this technology, leveraging BigQuery to integrate Salesforce customer information with information from its ads on Google as well as Analytics.

Algeco was the pilot project for this approach. The company’s marketing was 75% in digital, with Google representing 25% of its digital spending. Even so, Algeco was unable to see exactly which part of digital was contributing to contracts being signed.

When AWE brought Algeco’s digital contract information and ads together in Data Studio, it made a stunning discovery: The leads that Algeco obtained on Saturdays and Sundays generated the highest lead-to-contract conversion rate, but its ad performance did not reflect that. Algeco had even been decreasing bids on these days in order to decrease its cost per acquisition (CPA) per lead. With the insights from Data Studio, Algeco and AWE shifted their approach to ads on Google and began bidding for top spots on weekends.

Thanks to the digital information pairing in Data Studio, AWE was also able to see that the CPA model that Algeco had been following was misaligned with the KPIs that mattered most to revenue growth. AWE was also able to show Algeco that it could bid higher for certain product lines since the CRM conversions were actually higher than what they had believed, and could guide the company to keywords that would convert on higher-margin products.

AWE was able to identify the characteristics of the most profitable prospects — based on factors from the day and hour of their contacts to the specific Algeco web page they visited — and adjust keyword selection and ads strategy to improve profitability. AWE used what it learned from Data Studio to add new ranking criteria in Salesforce so that Algeco’s sales team could call the most profitable prospects from ads on Google first.

These insights, and the action taken on them, had a substantial impact on both Algeco’s qualified lead generation and overall company revenue, resulting in a 20% increase in the number of leads and a 152% increase in revenue generated by campaigns. The analysis also showed that, of the clients coming in through ad campaigns with Google, 55% were new to Algeco. No small wonder, then, that Algeco’s board of directors began to take a much higher interest in digital marketing.

Using Data Studio, AWE was able to uncover that a cost per lead approach was not the strategy driving the most revenue. The agency gained the ability to share digital information live, when the client needed it, making it possible for AWE to spend more of its time on client strategy rather than performance details and reporting. For its next steps, AWE intends to expand its use of information visualization to make the information gathered even more accessible to Algeco’s management team.