Fueling growth: How Gong and Google Ads drive sustainable revenue

If you’re driving revenue for a high-growth B2B company targeting enterprise customers, you know how complex it is to secure high-quality leads through paid search. You can’t cast a wide net; every marketing dollar must target the right opportunities. 

As the name goes, search engine marketing (SEM) relies on who’s searching for keywords (not personas or segments), we have to be strategic to target the conversions that matter most. This is especially difficult with upmarket buyers whose decision-making processes can be long and complex. To engage them at various stages, we rely on multi-touch, integrated campaigns — with paid search being a strategic channel. 

This is a challenge many of us face — and exactly why Gong and Google Ads team came together. 

Google Ads ranks among our top three sources for driving pipeline revenue. We have a full-funnel campaign strategy for our Google Ads campaigns to meet prospects where they are in their buying journey, including:  

In 2022, we took the first step towards implementing value based bidding (VBB). We used a static model that assigned value to leads based on criteria such as a demo request vs content download. While this strategy helped us generate more pipeline with the same budget in 2023, we knew there was the potential to do even more.

Sourcing more high-value customers — the brands that make the biggest impact to our bottom line — drives sustainable, long-term growth. So, in 2024, we decided to push the envelope with VBB and implemented a dynamic model that assigned values to leads based on their segment (SMB, mid-market, enterprise) and ideal customer profile (ICP). We focused on driving upmarket (enterprise-level) demos — those most likely to drive more revenue for Gong and with a higher potential to scale. 

Given our investment in Google Ads, always-on experimentation is another strategy we use to drive business impact. To drive more leads and improve campaign and landing page conversion rates, we run: 

We also collaborate with Gong’s SDR team to improve opportunity conversion rates. SDRs follow up with the leads, talk to the prospect to understand their challenges and convert them into opportunities. 

To help the team personalize their lead follow-up strategy, we added the search query — the exact words the prospect searched for — to lead alerts. This provides them with context they can use to personalize the follow up email and address the specific pain point the prospect was looking to solve. For example, the follow-up email sent to a buyer searching for sales prospecting software would be different from that sent to someone searching for a sales AI platform.

And the results speak for themselves: 

All without increasing our Google Ads spend.

For the Google Ads team, efficiency and scale are paramount. But with thousands of sellers worldwide, it’s a massive challenge to capture and effectively use individual, team, and regional data. That’s where Gong steps in. Google uses Gong’s Revenue AI Platform to drive alignment, speed up decision-making, and boost productivity.

Our partnership with Google Ads is ambitious, successful, and just getting started. We’re excited about the new innovations that will shape the next outcomes of our work together. We’ll continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in sales and marketing — refining strategies, optimizing campaigns, and supporting our respective businesses to expand our pipelines. 

As we evolve together, we’re not just setting new standards — we’re crafting the future of B2B revenue generation.