How to Find Better Leads: The Adtech Guide

Generating leads is and will always be one of the most important tasks a sales org will have. They are the base of your pipeline and their quality is what determines your company’s success. In this blog post, we’re going to show you how to ensure you’re reading correctly all the metrics that matter when doing lead generation specifically for the adtech industry.

You can also check out our prospecting checklist for a shortlist of all the things you need to prepare before your first meeting with a new prospect.

Traffic & website performance: why it matters when generating leads for adtech

When generating leads, the first thing you need to focus on is the amount of traffic coming into your prospect’s site. This will allow you to understand the size of the business opportunity, and how you’re going to prioritize those leads. Throughout this blog post, we’re going to use topshop.com website performance during Black Friday and Cyber Monday as an example.

We can see that they had almost 7.8M total visits in November, and they increased by a little over 8% compared to October. That sounds like a pretty good Black Friday and Cyber Monday performance (it’s a total increase of about 616k in traffic), but actually, in order to be able to make those assertions, you need to take into account the performance of competitors within their industry. So we’re also going to take a look at prettylittlething.com and riverisland.com.

prettylittlething.com had almost 10.4M total visits, and an increase of 15% percent in November compared to October.

On the other hand, riverisland.com had 10.9M total visits, having increased by a whopping 26.6% since October.

Placing them side by side as seen in the image above, the winner in terms of traffic share during November was riverisland.com, but the competition was nevertheless strong.

When we take website performance into consideration, we notice that although riverisland.com indeed had more traffic, almost half of their visitors abandoned the site after viewing just one page. This is problematic for a retail site as users must visit multiple pages to complete a transaction, and it can be a symptom of other issues such as unsuccessful matching of products to visitor profile, or technical concerns related to poor UX or site optimization.

If we take into account the visits that did not bounce, we notice that actually, prettylittlething.com had more visits and better overall site performance. This puts things into perspective when evaluating traffic, performance, and growth during crucial tentpole events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Why traffic & website performance matters when generating leads for adtech

Website performance and engagement matter because knowing the number of people that arrive on the website will impact impressions on any ad that is placed there. Engagement should also be taken into account (especially bounce rate) because it’s a metric that shows not only how many people arrive on the website but how many are intentionally browsing it.

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Marketing channels: why it matters when generating leads for adtech

To really understand the marketing strategy of a site, looking at which channels they are pushing, and where they are falling behind, will give you a good idea of whether they can be a good fit for you.

This channel overview shows us that riverisland.com emphasized paid marketing the most as part of their strategy during November. But comparing topshop.com (our initial lead) to the entire fashion industry, we can see in the image below that they over-emphasize organic search when they should actually be pushing paid search more in order to keep up with industry benchmarks.

Why marketing channels matter when generating leads for adtech

Being able to see whether a lead is investing in display ads, and how they compare to industry benchmarks is very helpful to (1) decide whether it’s a relevant lead (2) curate a better pitch as to why they should work with you. You should make sure a lead is investing in display ads, and show them how you can get them to perform at least within the industry benchmark.

Technologies: why it matters when generating leads for adtech

Seeing which technologies a website is currently using will give us a good idea of (1) who they are working with, and (2) what their advertising spend looks like. This allows you to understand whether you can be a good fit for them and vice versa.

Here we see a list of all the advertising technologies topshop.com is currently using. They’re working with social media advertising vendors such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google, which signal that paid social is an important part of their strategy.

Why technology matters when generating leads for adtech

Keeping tabs on the technology your leads have used to build their site will give you very good information on how important of a channel this is for them, and allow you to tailor your pitch when reaching out because you already know who you’re up against. Creating a list of reasons why your partnership can increase their performance in comparison to their current technology partners can be an instant icebreaker.

User acquisition breakdown: why it matters when generating leads for adtech

Understanding where your prospect’s paid traffic is coming from will allow you to understand who they are currently working with and how much traffic they receive from each vendor. This will help you tailor your pitch.

Awin brings a little over 80% of traffic to topshop.com, and Skimlinks another 15%. Both are global affiliate marketing networks, suggesting affiliate marketing is core to their strategy. Pitch your value proposition relative to Awin and Skimlinks to win this business.

Why a user acquisition breakdown matters when generating leads for adtech

Reaching out to leads for the first time isn’t easy, but when you know exactly who they are receiving paid traffic from, you can really personalize your outreach and use consultative selling techniques to show value right off the bat.

In summary

Understanding your leads in-depth will allow you to really understand whether they’re of good quality, a good fit for your sales org, how to prioritize them, and prepare a strategy to engage them. For more information on how to do this using Similarweb data, get in contact here.