How we went from our worst month to our best in 60 days

In PLG companies, marketing is the most stressful role. You’re often the only one responsible for generating revenue, so if you hit your target you’re the hero, but should you miss it you better find a new job. 

Moreover, you’re always on your toes as there's no guarantee that what worked in the past will continue to work. The campaign that killed it might suddenly stop delivering, and a fantastic month might be followed by a particularly poor one.

Which is precisely what I experienced at Datree last June. That month, we recorded the second-lowest number of product-qualified signups ever since I joined the company:

And this wasn't something I could dismiss as “fluctuation”. We observed a persistent downward trend in signups for several months. Each month was slightly worse than the last, until, in June, it was significantly worse.

Moreover, I understood why this was happening.

Until then, my strategy comprised two main components:

1. Videos produced by DevOps influencers on YouTube, which were essentially comprehensive product demos.

2. Paid YouTube in-feed ads, which promoted these videos as "Recommended Videos".

I discussed this strategy in detail in another post.

This strategy had been effective, but it had two issues.

First, I was limited in my ability to experiment with targeting. YouTube doesn't offer the option to target by profession, and my workaround involved casting a broad net, hoping to reach DevOps and SREs along with others.

How broad was this net? About 20 million impressions per month broad.

To be sure, that’s not a typo: Despite a modest budget, we managed to reach 20 million impressions a month thanks to the affordability of in-feed ads. These are the ugly stepchild of in-stream ads, YouTube’s flagship product, and they are priced accordingly.

(Once, on a call with a Google Ads rep, I told her I was using in-feed ads. To my surprise, she didn’t know what those were. When I showed it to her, she was slightly taken aback and referred to them as "legacy ads")

This approach had helped us overcome YouTube's imprecise targeting for months, but it offered little room for experimentation when it stopped working. It was a quantity-over-quality game.

The second problem was ad fatigue: Our audience simply became blind to the 3 or 4 influencer videos we were sharing. 

Typically, you'd refresh the creative in this case, but that wasn't an option for us. There's a limit to the number of dedicated influencer videos you can produce, especially in a niche field like DevOps with few influencers.

It was a challenging situation. Numbers were almost at an all-time low, and although my job wasn't actually at risk (Datree's CEO was experienced enough to react to the crises with calm), it felt like sh*t. I take pride in driving growth, and I take it personally when I fail to do so.

I had to find a new way to reach our target audience, and so I came up with a solution: Redefine our influencer marketing strategy to supplement our dedicated videos with product placements and influencer ads.

Both ads are incorporated into regular, non-branded influencer videos. Product placements are demonstrations of the product within the video, whereas influencer ads mention our sponsorship and provide a brief product description but don't demonstrate its use.

(Here is an example for a product placement and here for an influencer ad.)

I reasoned that only a limited number of users would click on an ad featuring a video solely about Datree and even fewer would watch a significant portion. Therefore, if I wanted to expand my reach, I needed to lower the barrier, letting users familiarize themselves with Datree without committing to a full product video.

And it worked.

In June (AKA the second-worst month ever), I launched these new ad types, and we saw immediate results. In July, the number of product-qualified signups increased by 50%, and in August, they increased by an additional 11%, making it our best month ever:

In 60 days, we went from our second-worst to our best month, thanks to product placements and influencer ads.

However, this doesn't mean we abandoned our previous strategy of combining dedicated videos with paid distribution. The dedicated videos continued to make sense as they allowed interested users who had watched a product placement or an influencer ad to learn more.

Interestingly, the data supported this. Product placements and influencer ads drastically improved the performance of our in-feed ads. Our cost per view dropped from $0.5 in June to $0.3 in July, marking a 40% decrease:

(By the way, these graphs are imported from the weekly and monthly reports I share internally at Datree. I'm considering writing a post dedicated to my reporting strategy. Please let me know in the comments if that would interest you!)

This was a clear indication that combining the two tactics was effective. Users were watching the product placements and influencer ads, which made them more inclined to click on the in-feed ads promoting the dedicated videos. It was a classic case where 1+1 equals 3.