Top Takeaways from Blackbird’s “Ask the PPC Search Engine Land Award Winners” SMX Panel

One great bonus of being a two-time 2024 Search Engine Land award winner (Best Small Agency - PPC and Best B2B Search Marketing Initiative - PPC) was that our Chief Client Officer, Jack Stampfl, got to represent Blackbird on the “Ask the PPC Award Winners” panel at SMX Next last month.

Our SMX hardware came with some thought leadership attached.

Jack (and his fellow panelists) dished up a bunch of award-winning PPC agency insights on live audience questions. We’ve pulled the highlights for you in case you don’t have time to watch the recording (which you can find here until May 13, 2025).

Jack, Jessica, Nicolas, and host Anu covered a ton of ground with clarity and depth.

What qualities have made Corelight (the longtime client whose campaigns helped us win the awards) such a good partner over the years?

Corelight’s strong marketing ops helped Blackbird access all the data we needed to optimize their campaigns toward the metrics (opportunities and pipeline) that truly drove growth for their business. With that data, we could feed information back to Google to help the algorithm find highly qualified leads, not just any leads.

Corelight’s second strength, which proved essential to campaign success, is a very strong lead nurturing function. This means when we drive the right kind of leads, Corelight can use their email nurturing program and great content repository to turn the leads into opportunities.

The last piece that’s made Corelight such a good partner is their responsible approach to budgeting. Together, we’ve built scale while maintaining efficiency, but it’s been steady growth; there have been no wild budget increases with expectations of 5x growth at the same ROAS.

When you’re using value-based bidding for lead gen, what conversion value scale do you recommend?

Jack was happy to take this question because we love value-based bidding and its first cousin, weighted revenue. Instead of setting an arbitrary scale, he recommended looking at the rate from the first conversion event (a form fill or phone call) to pipeline or closed/won and backing into the predicted value that way. Additionally, if you do have more than one conversion event (e.g call and form fill) make sure you’re comparing the rate of eventual conversion between the two – they’ll have different CVRs – and set different values accordingly.

It’s certainly true that many brands don’t have the IT resources to set up enhanced conversions or CAPI to get sufficient conversion data to pull this off. In those cases, Jack recommended doing (or asking your PPC agency to do) a regular (maybe 3 times weekly) manual gclid upload of your conversions to keep the data flowing. 

Can you use promos/discounts for upper-funnel ads?

In response to this question, Jack advised that while promotions for upper-funnel ads can work, sometimes they’re not the right move for the business’s bottom line. Because big promotions tend to attract less loyal, lower-LTV customers, he recommended segmenting promotion-based users and non-promotion-based users and tracking post-purchase behavior for each segment. The data may show that running promos isn’t worth it in the long run.

How can you get more out of your Google agency reps with Google pulling back support? 

It can happen that clients in the onboarding process with Blackbird (and many other startup advertising agencies) don’t have a rep assigned right away. In those cases, Jack recommended contacting trusted reps you’ve worked with in the past and saying, “Hey, we’ve got this new client, we think there’s a lot of opportunity, and I’d like to set up a call to pick your brain.” That approach can help you get more than support – it can help you set up a brand with a Google rep you’ve already vetted in the past who won’t just blindly try to sell the client on features they shouldn’t use.

On targeting high-CPC B2B keywords with CPAs in the thousands of dollars range: are there alternative demand gen or PMax campaigns that can do the trick?

While the other panelist cited some success with both campaign types, Jack cautioned that many brands give up on search too quickly if they’re not seeing immediate results from expensive keywords. Instead, he recommended that the brands lower the bid and continue to optimize the keyword to collect traffic over time, even in a position far down the SERP.

Jack added that while it’s always important to integrate data from down-funnel events for optimization purposes, it’s especially important for paid search campaigns with high-CPC keywords. With enough down-funnel data, Google will be far less likely to find expensive clicks for weak leads and will instead put your budget to work finding users closer to your ICP.

For shopping and PMax campaigns losing impression share due to Ad Rank, what can you do to improve? What do low mobile rankings do to affect this?

The other panelists mentioned different elements to optimize to lift Ad Rank, but Jack cautioned that because Ad Rank is a calculation of Quality Score and bid, brands should make sure to keep bids at costs that make sense for their business goals, even if that caps Ad Rank. 

In those instances, he recommended a focus on quality ads and compelling landing pages and testing different ad concepts rather than joining the herd ranking high with similar messaging.

Do you work with brands using 100% Performance Max or a combo of PMax and Standard Shopping? 

At Blackbird, the usual approach for B2C and eCommerce brands is to go hybrid, with Performance Max getting between 50-80% of the search budget. Smart Shopping tends to perform relatively well for our clients, so we preserve those campaigns and their manual controls where possible.

My Google strategist tells me there are no best practices for ads to show up in AI Overviews. Any tips on how to get paid ads included in AIO?

Jack and the other panelists agreed that nobody knows at this point, though ads are starting to filter into AIO, and AIO results are showing up on more transactional searches. It’s a matter of staying on top of news and trends and pivoting your strategies to meet the moment.

You don’t have to wait for the next SMX to get Jack’s take on trending topics; drop us a line if you’d like to chat about challenges in your PPC campaigns.