We pivoted our entire Q1 budget away from search to “create demand” and the performance team is now screaming at me

[roasppc-dot-com]

Few companies have the creative chops to make really good demand gen ads that actually work. Their idea of demand gen is boring generic ads targeted at somewhat relevant top of funnel audiences. Then they cross their fingers and hope for the best.

Good demand gen ads need to be memorable, and have an almost viral quality to get people taking.

Just turn back on your old ads and don’t sweat, things will pick up again

[captainplaid]

I see a version of this at my agency constantly. The analytics or strategy team identifies an upper funnel gap, makes a compelling case, and the right answer is incremental budget. But the client doesn’t have more budget, so the recommendation becomes “shift money from search.” Sometimes that’s not wrong. There are clients running search at a scale where the marginal cost per conversion is way too high and they don’t realize it. But you figure that out by pulling back 10% at a time and watching what happens. Not by pausing $200k in Q1 with no baseline.

The 35% conversion drop is actually really useful information now. You cut spend 40% and lost 35%. If you had cut spend 40% and only lost 15% of conversion, you would think the Brand team was right. Still not how you should go about testing something like that though.

The core problem is no one defined success criteria or a test structure before making a move this size. LinkedIn ABM needs 90 days minimum to show pipeline impact. Judging it after one week while search is paused isn’t a real test of anything.

I would restore search and run LinkedIn at a smaller budget with a real timeline and defined metrics. And document everything from the last three weeks.

[wittgk]

AI slop post. This is so obviously not written by a person.