In April 2021, Tipalti made a $40M acquisition of procurement software company Approve.com. The acquisition was made to integrate Approve’s procurement product with the two core products in Tipalti’s suite: AP Automation & Global Mass Payments.
At the time, I was leading Tipalti’s Inbound Marketing team and I was off-the-walls elated by the news.
I wasn’t ecstatic about the product itself (as most all my leaders and co-workers were), so much as I was ecstatic about the domain…
Immediately upon hearing the news, my SEO brain started thinking about this domain’s growth potential. Potential which, admittedly, hasn’t been 100% realized yet, but which is massive for the company nonetheless.
Before I go any further, let me address what a dual-domain strategy is.
A duel-domain strategy is an expansion play that one company (call it a “parent company”) carries out by acquiring or building a second web property to expand its paid and organic search footprints.
Tipalti’s acquisition of Approve.com presented our team with the absolute perfect opportunity to double up on the company’s presence for leads-producing traffic & bottom-of-funnel keywords.
Visually-speaking, if Tipalti’s program had been growing like this:
Then, the dual-domain strategy would be Tipalti-squared. 📈 📈
We leverage three main channels for the dual-domain strategy: SEO, CRO, & Paid Search.
I’ll provide a breakdown of each in the case study below.
It worked.
Since implementing our growth processes, and to the extraordinary credit of Approve’s team members, we were able to collectively grow Approve.com’s organic search footprint from this point:
To this point:
Using Ahrefs as our 3rd-party data source, traffic grew 165% from 833 visitors per month to 22,023 visitors per month.
The SEO Segment of Approve.com’s Dual-Domain Strategy
We wanted to double-up on the company’s coverage for high-value search terms across both Organic and Paid channels.
Example:
Running ads and content for both Tipalti.com and Approve.com could allow us to take two positions for a keyword like “AP Automation” (and others). Our goal was to show Approve.com as a second ad placement opportunity next to Tipalti.com’s ad, plus grow Approve.com’s organic rankings for this and other high-value keyword opportunities.
The steps I took to build a successful dual-domain strategy were:
- I created enthusiasm and buy-in amongst Tipalti & Approve’s internal teams, so that we could acquire permission to move our dual-domain strategy forward.
- I secured campaign budgets to allocate additional resources to Approve.com’s Organic and Paid programs.
- I worked with Approve.com’s existing web team to blend Tipalti’s SEO content development processes & trainings.
This work entailed:
- Building the SEO Content Priority log.
- Training Approve’s team on Tipalti’s existing content generation & optimization processes.
- Building detailed content briefs.
- Running SEO tests on Approve.com to capture low-hanging-fruit traffic opportunities.
- Regularly meeting with Approve’s team to maintain alignment on growth priorities.
- Scaling process while supporting & empowering our Approve.com team members.
The Paid Search Segment of Approve.com’s Dual-Domain Strategy
I also wanted to double up our real-estate for paid ads on high-value terms, but when we acquired Approve.com, the paid search portion of their marketing strategy was virtually non-existent and we didn’t have the infrastructure necessary to run with this campaign. A big part of this was the lack of resources that Approve had at their disposal.
Fortunately, when I championed the idea internally, we received a lot of buy-in and support to allocate additional campaign spend toward doubling up our keywords through Approve.com’s ad accounts.
This portion of the strategy entailed:
- Aligning leadership & paid search resources.
- Building & launching paid search landing pages.
- Connecting Marketo form IDs with our new landing page forms.
- Troubleshooting data attribution challenges so that we could attribute leads and opportunities to the Approve.com campaign in Salesforce.
- Incorporating Mutiny to scale out more paid search landing pages & tie them to our ad groups.
The Conversion-Rate Optimization Segment of Approve.com’s Dual-Domain Strategy
As I’ve previously discussed in Tipalti’s Path to 5X Growth as a FinTech Unicorn, conversion rate optimization was a big part of our early success.
So, when we acquired Approve.com, one of the first things we focused on was applying the winning CRO techniques that drove leads increases for Tipalti on the Approve.com website.
We wanted to maximize the existing traffic-to-leads ratio on Approve.com while the SEO and PPC campaigns were being set in motion.
This portion of the strategy entailed:
- Identifying the topical hubs and gated assets that Approve.com had at our disposal.
- Creating unique hero CTAs for each of the content hubs, which would link to the most-relevant gated asset we could find.
- Applying CRO agency resources to build hypotheses and testing roadmap for Approve’s highest-opportunity areas: homepage, paid search LPs, and above-the-fold areas where high-intent traffic was to be found.
Summary
The doubling up of traffic and SERP real estate with our acquisition of Approve.com was an opportunity that our team utilized to our best advantage.
I won’t sugarcoat this campaign. It took a LOT of legwork just to get our team aligned and build the necessary pieces that would set the growth strategies in motion.
On the organic side, Approve.com grew 165% from approximately 800+ clicks per month to more than 20,000 clicks per month, while increasing our traffic-to-leads conversion rate & growing additional leads from paid search.
