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How we booked 58 meetings per month with Google ads

How we booked 58 meetings per month with Google ads

4 learnings as we scaled from 0 to 58 meetings per month in 8 weeks

Austin Hughes
December 11, 2024

Hey there, Austin here 👋

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

Last week I tossed out the idea of sharing our paid ads strategy. I got so many responses asking for me to give you an inside look. So that’s what we’re talking about today.

Let’s get into it.

📒 GTM Playbook

How we booked 58 meetings per month with Google ads

4 learnings as we scaled from 0 to 58 meetings per month in 8 weeks

Around this time last year, Unify had no repeatable GTM motion. I was still running founder-led sales. We had no inbound channels up and running.

The first step towards changing that was our seed round announcement on LinkedIn & X. Then we layered in an ongoing organic content motion on both platforms.

And more recently, we’ve added paid ads on Google.

Our perspective is that we want a heavily diversified top-of-funnel across many demand gen channels. So long as the unit economics work, we’ll lean into it.

Over the last 8 weeks, we’ve scaled our spend to tens of thousands per month, and last month booked 58 meetings from Google ads.

Paid is an expensive CAC channel but it works and its an important piece of every growth team’s arsenal.

Here are 4 of the learnings we’ve picked up going from 0 to 1 on our paid channel.

Spend more to learn.

When we first started running paid, it was a side project. We’d spent a few thousand dollars per month in hopes of finding an ad or keyword that worked.

It wasn’t until we scaled spend into 5-figure per month range that we were able to quickly learn what worked and what didn’t.

Think of it like running outbound. If someone came to you and said “outbound doesn’t work,” but they were only sending 3 emails per day, you’d laugh. Volume has to be so much higher. Same idea here.

If you want to get paid to work, be ready to invest 5-figures per month. At least for a few months to learn.

Get in the weeds of the ad account.

More spend doesn’t immediately translate into more meetings and more revenue.

Especially when you're early in testing, you're going to have to make iterating on your campaigns a top focus in your day-to-day.

As we ramped up our spend, Rhea (Growth Lead at Unify) spent a lot more time in the ad accounts. It took ~2 weeks of her being in the ad accounts several hours per day to truly start seeing success in the numbers.

As you start to learn what levers work, you can wean off both budget and time spent tweaking the ads. But it takes that initial period of intense learning to get there. Don’t try to go slow and steady with this, go all in.

Start broad, then narrow in.

We started doing the opposite, and it hurt us. When we started testing, we tried to get specific from the beginning—only targeting a certain set of key words on exact match that related closely to our brand, like warm outbound and automated outbound.

The issue was that the intent behind these searches was coming from people who were already searching for solutions like ours, we needed to widen our scope to those who might not know what they need.

What turned out to work better?

Start broad. Broader key words, broader set of match types. Then use levers like negative search keywords—or just checking constantly to make sure you're not spending on the wrong key words and pausing keywords that aren’t working.

For example, we use outbound as a keyword, but needed to exclude keywords like outbound calling software or outbound dialer as those aren’t products we offer.

Make sure you're optimizing for the right goal.

This one’s important. Here’s how the progression looked for us.

Early on in testing, we just optimized for clicks.
Then we optimized for form fills (but weren’t focused on whether these leads actually booked demos).
Then we optimized for demos booked once we had enough volume.

It wasn’t until we optimized specifically for demos booked that we saw meetings 2.5x and CAC go down by 70%. It’s kind of like only optimizing for impressions on organic LinkedIn. Sure, impressions are important. But at the end of the day we need to see a lift in pipeline.

Seems obvious in hindsight, but it’s easy to get tied up in metrics that don’t actually matter a whole lot.

Always be iterating.

Paid spend isn’t something you just set and forget. You should constantly be iterating on budget and target CPA—both levers to pull for how much you spend and where Google bids.

This lift here goes down as you get this motion up and running. Rhea’s not spending hours of her day in the ad account anymore. But she’s still going in a few times per day to check on whether we’re spending our full budget or not.

And if not, we’ll turn up target CPA or expand to broader keyword match types to get momentum going and increase impressions again.

Final thoughts

The main takeaway for Rhea and I was that there is no silver bullet in Google Ads. We initially thought low spend on a few, specific keywords would bring us qualified meetings.

Turns out, it takes a lot of being in the weeds to find success.

You also need to be ready to spend (and waste) a good chunk of budget while you learn what works.

I wrote about this more in my “How to build a winning growth team” essay, but failure and learnings are celebrated on our growth team. There’s no way we would crack Google ads if Rhea was scared to lose budget.

Hope this walkthrough was helpful.

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

Automated Plays in Unify

We dog-food Unify a ton. And one of the most impactful features for our GTM team to date has been automated Plays.

We launched Plays back in April. Garrett’s first mandate was to get us to 25 meetings / mo as quickly as possible.

In 2-3 weeks we started seeing some results, we were booking 10-15 meetings / mo. This was good, but not great.

By the end of June we hadn’t made much more progress. We actually considered putting down the channel to focus on others.

But in July we hit a tipping point. Garrett had pushed 10-15 plays live and many of them were starting to work with 1-2 meetings / week.

We dialed up volume and started to see real results. 4-5 meetings booked per DAY, it was exhilarating.

We’ve sustained this since and in October, 29% of new ARR came from automated outbound. In November that number was also over 20%.

We power this channel 100% with Unify. Unify powers signals, email waterfalls, sequencing, bounce detection, and pipeline reporting.

If you want to set up automated Plays for your GTM team, get in touch here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

If you’ve made it here, I appreciate you reading. I’ve had a lot of fun writing these first three editions.

As always, let me know what you want to hear from me next. I’m thinking the next piece will be a deep dive on how I transitioned out of founder-led sales.