ABM & Campaign Review — 2026-03-11

Weekly sync with AviaryAI reviewing ABM email campaign performance, Google Ads strategy, GA4 attribution integrity, and SEO technical errors.

Attendees: Mark Hope, Sebastian Gant, Karly Oykhman, Avokerie Onorimuo (Asymmetric); Aaron Grossman, Justin Dwyer, Abraham Blesson (AviaryAI)

Overview

The call surfaced a consistent theme: strong top-of-funnel signals that aren't yet connecting to pipeline. The ABM campaign is generating exceptional engagement metrics, but Aaron reports almost no cold inbound leads. Google Ads is healthy but structurally blocked from advancing. Analytics data is unreliable due to UTM gaps and GTM misconfiguration. All of these converge on the same root problem: insufficient conversion instrumentation to make data-driven decisions.

Key Decisions

• ABM automation trigger change: The current workflow cancels email sequences when a HubSpot deal is created, which inadvertently stops outreach to other business units within the same credit union. Decision: change the cancellation trigger to the Opportunity lifecycle stage so only contacts actively in a deal are suppressed, not their colleagues.
• Next 100 ABM accounts: Aaron will send the next batch by EOD the following day; they'll enter the sequence at email 1 while existing contacts roll into emails 7–12.
• Conversion actions before bidding strategy change: Google Ads cannot move from "maximize clicks" to "maximize conversions" until 5–6 conversion actions are live. This is the explicit gate for the next phase of ad strategy.
• Case studies to archive: Three finalized case studies will be added to the Webflow archive page. Justin will share updated links with the sales team once live. Dev must not break existing archive entries when modifying the template.

Topic Notes

ABM Email Campaign

• 101 accounts in the current sequence; ~60% open rate (benchmark: ~20%), ~30% click rate, near-zero bounces, 8 unsubscribes.
• High engagement is not translating to inbound leads. Aaron estimates fewer than 5% of inbound leads are cold; in 7 months, roughly 4 cold leads total.
• Firewall hypothesis: Aaron raised concern that credit union firewalls auto-open emails and click links. Mark's counterpoint: firewalls typically open but don't click multiple links across multiple emails. The 3 AM timestamps are a known artifact of the N8N/SQS/SNS capture pipeline, not evidence of bot activity.
• High-intent contacts (e.g., 5–6 clicks across the sequence) should trigger a HubSpot task for Aaron to follow up manually. Mark to configure this.
• Automation conflict: Sequence cancellation on deal creation is too aggressive — it stops outreach to the whole company when Aaron is only working one contact. Aaron will propose preferred behavior when he sends the next account list.

Google Ads

• Three search campaigns running; no Performance Max. Budget is spending ~40% of allocation.
• Current metrics: ~3,000 impressions/month, ~$300 spend, ~7% CTR, ~$0.10 CPC. Healthy ratios, low volume.
• Structural blocker: Campaigns are optimizing for clicks. Cannot switch to "maximize conversions" without conversion data. Only one conversion action is currently configured (Schedule a Demo click).
• Target: Implement 5–6 conversion actions — video plays, document downloads, form fills, phone calls, appointment bookings.
• Long-term roadmap: Evolve to 8–10 campaigns segmented by funnel stage (ToFu, MoFu, retargeting) with distinct bid strategies. End of March was cited as the point where enough history exists to begin splitting campaigns.
• Competitor sighting: "Retail AI" appeared in search terms. Justin confirmed they're an indirect competitor with a horizontal, developer-focused play — different audience (devs vs. business decision-makers) and different content strategy. Sebastian will monitor but not mirror their keyword approach directly.

GA4 & Analytics Attribution

• UTM gap: Email traffic is appearing as "Direct" in GA4. Only 5 sessions attributed to email despite the campaign volume. Likely cause: some ABM email links are missing UTM parameters. Mark noted UTM tagging is policy but acknowledged gaps happen.
• GTM misconfiguration: Events are configured as Google Ads conversions but not marked as GA4 key events. Result: only the "Schedule a Demo" click appears as a key event in GA4. Other interactions (form fills, downloads) are invisible in organic reporting.
• Action: Karly and Sebastian to audit UTM tagging across all ABM emails and fix. Sebastian to reconfigure GTM so conversion events surface as GA4 key events as well.
• Justin's goal: use GA4 as the unified view across all channels — ABM, email, ads — to connect initiatives to conversion outcomes.

SEO & Website

• Multiple H1 tags: Several pages have more than one H1, which damages SEO. Root cause: developers used H1 elements for visual styling rather than semantic structure. Fix: use CSS for font sizing; reserve H1 for the single main page title per page.
• Missing H1s: Some pages have no H1 at all. Sebastian to audit and fix both issues.
• Verticals pages: V2 copy is complete. Content is intentionally longer than ideal to compensate for AviaryAI's lower domain rating — ranking = content × domain authority, so more content is needed until DR improves. Justin to review and comment in the shared doc.
• Case studies: Three finalized. Sebastian to add to Webflow archive. Dev note: archive uses a template-driven CMS; changes to the template affect all entries, so existing pages must be verified after any template edits.
• Blog posts: Sebastian to draft posts targeting verticals keywords and share with Justin.

Action Items

Transcript Excerpts

On ABM engagement vs. pipeline disconnect:

"I have gotten zero [meeting bookings] so far. I've gotten one email response... There might have been four [cold leads] that were cold [in seven months]." — Aaron

On firewall hypothesis:

"There's no firewall that I know of that would open an email and click on every single link." — Mark

On the automation conflict:

"I might be talking to one business unit and the other business unit might not even know. So I wouldn't say just because I have a deal, that means we shouldn't reach out to the whole credit union." — Aaron

On the Google Ads bidding blocker:

"Maximizing for clicks is not a good strategy beyond the first 90 days, but you can't really optimize for anything else until you have conversions, and we just don't have any." — Mark

On the H1 SEO issue:

"Some developers, if they want something to be big, they'll just say, oh, I'm making an H1, that makes it big — but that's not what you want to do. You want to use an H2 and then change the font size." — Mark

On the analytics goal:

"I just want to make sure we're getting everything connected... getting some connection to each of those conversion events so that we can start seeing the true insight of, okay, it's subject line A or it's blog post D that is actually truly getting us some of those value points." — Justin

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