Yearly Archives: 2025

The Importance of Conversion Tracking in Life Science Marketing

Željislav Petrovič 11:31 am , September 2, 2025

You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure

In life science marketing, success isn’t just about driving website traffic or racking up clicks – it’s about generating real business outcomes. If you want to know whether your campaigns are doing the job, you need to track what actually matters: the actions people take that move them closer to becoming customers.

That’s where conversion tracking comes in. Without it, you are left guessing which marketing strategies are actually working, and which are wasting your budget. With it, you’ll have a clear view of which strategies drive leads and revenue, allowing you to optimize spending and prove your marketing’s ROI.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the basics of conversion tracking, highlight its benefits, explain how it helps track the customer journey, and give you a quick look at how to set it up with tools like Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

What is Conversion Tracking?

Simply put, conversion tracking is the practice of monitoring user actions that align with your marketing or business objectives. A “conversion” can be any meaningful interaction – from requesting a quote to downloading a brochure or signing up for a demo.

Not every conversion is equally valuable. Some directly generate revenue, while others reveal a user’s intent or signal interest in your products / services. If you only track the end-of-funnel actions, you’ll miss out on valuable insights about how prospects are engaging before they’re ready to make a purchase decision. On the other hand, if you focus only on early interactions, you won’t get a clear picture of which campaigns actually drive revenue.

That’s why conversion tracking isn’t just about collecting data. It’s also about structuring and analyzing that data in a way that can support smarter decisions. By organizing different types of conversions and understanding their role in the customer journey, you can evaluate not just whether your marketing is working, but how it’s working. This approach makes it easier to identify the touchpoints that generate interest, the ones that accelerate movement through the funnel, and the ones that actually close the deal / result in sales.

Conversion Groupings: Macro vs. Micro and Across the Funnel

To gain meaningful insights from conversion data, marketers typically divide conversions into macro and micro actions, and then align them with stages of the marketing funnel. This hierarchy ensures you can see not only which campaigns generate final sales, but also how prospects are engaging along the way.

Macro Conversions: These are the primary, high-value actions that directly contribute to your business’s revenue or lead pipeline. For a life science company, a macro conversion is the ultimate desired action, such as a purchase or a quote request.
Micro Conversions: These are mid- to low-value, supporting actions that indicate a user is moving down the marketing funnel and has some level of interest. While they may not have immediate monetary value, they are crucial for understanding user intent and can be used for building highly targeted audiences. Examples include downloading a product brochure, watching a product video, or adding a product to a cart.

Mapping Conversions Across the Funnel

Mapping conversions to funnel stages provides a clearer picture of their role in the customer journey. While the funnel is rarely linear in practice, this framework helps clarify which actions reflect awareness, consideration, or decision-making.

Conversion Type	Funnel Stage	Examples	Strategic Value
Micro	Top of Funnel (Awareness)	Video plays, blog post views, pricing page views, product/service page views, CTA button clicks	Measures top-of-funnel reach and content engagement. Helps identify new audience segments and analyze user behavior.
Micro	Middle of Funnel (Consideration)	Whitepaper, case study and brochure downloads, webinar registrations, newsletter sign-ups, contact form submissions, phone calls	Indicates a user’s active interest. Provides a list of warm leads for follow-up and retargeting.
Macro	Bottom of Funnel (Decision)	Product/service inquiries, quote requests, demo sign-ups, e-commerce purchases	Represents the final goal. Directly ties marketing efforts to sales and ROI.

Why You Should Use Conversion Tracking

Implementing conversion tracking provides a powerful foundation for data-driven marketing, helping life science companies focus on strategies that truly deliver results. Some of the key benefits include:

Measure the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns: Understand which channels, campaigns, and even specific ads are driving meaningful results. For example, see whether paid search, email, or social campaigns are generating qualified leads for a new product line you launched.
Understand Multi-Channel Influence – Conversion tracking reveals how different marketing channels work together. For example, you can see that a lead who filled out a quote request form first discovered your brand through a LinkedIn ad, subscribed to your email newsletter, and after some time re-visited the website through a display remarketing ad to complete the form. These insights can help you optimize your cross-channel strategies.
Improve Marketing ROI: Identify what works and double down on it, while reducing spend on underperforming campaigns. Conversion tracking allows you to allocate budget efficiently, ensuring every dollar invested in marketing contributes to revenue or high-quality leads.
Optimize User Journeys: Detect where prospects drop off in the funnel, from awareness to decision. Use these insights to refine landing pages, CTAs, and forms, increasing the likelihood of conversion at every stage.
Enable Better Targeting: Use conversion data to segment audiences more effectively, personalize messaging, and retarget users based on real engagement signals. For instance, you can target users who downloaded a datasheet but haven’t yet requested a quote.
Report With Confidence: Present accurate, actionable insights to company leadership or key stakeholders, backed by real conversion data rather than surface-level clicks or traffic. This builds credibility and clearly demonstrates marketing impact.
Align With Sales: Track the actions that matter most to your sales team, such as quote requests or purchase requests, not just page views. This ensures marketing and sales are aligned around shared goals and driving measurable business growth.

What Actions Life Science Businesses Should Track

Here are some of the specific actions you should be tracking, organized by the user’s intent and your strategic goals:

Awareness & Content Engagement Actions: These are actions that build general awareness and measure content resonance. This includes tracking video plays (e.g., watching a product demo video for over 30 seconds), key button clicks (e.g., “View Products”, “View Services”, or “Download Data Sheet”), as well as views of product/service pages, pricing page, and key blog posts or resource pages. These signals tell you what content is resonating with your audience at the top of the funnel.
Lead Generation & Nurturing Actions: These actions are focused on converting website visitors into leads and providing them with the information they need to become sales-ready opportunities. This includes contact form submissions, downloads of high-value gated content like whitepapers and case studies, and webinar sign-ups.
Opportunities & High-Intent Actions: These are a subset of most valuable macro conversions, signaling a user is ready for a direct sales conversation. This includes tracking phone number clicks and phone calls, a click on a sales representative’s calendar link to book a meeting, product/service inquiries, request for a quote, or a demo sign-up.
E-commerce & Revenue Actions: For businesses such as an online store selling lab equipment or consumables, tracking transactional e-commerce actions is crucial. This includes actions like adding a product to the cart, starting the checkout process, adding payment info, and completing the final purchase. This data is essential for calculating Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and optimizing your campaigns to drive revenue.

How to Set Up Conversion Tracking

Implementing conversion tracking may seem daunting, but with the right tools and a well-defined plan, it’s a straightforward process. Here we will focus on the Google tech stack (Google Tag Manager, Google Tag, and Google Analytics 4), since these are among the most common and effective tools for setting up conversion tracking. While other platforms have their own solutions, starting with Google provides a solid foundation that can be integrated with LinkedIn, Meta, or X.

Google Tag Manager (GTM): Think of GTM as your command center for deploying and managing all tracking codes. Instead of adding snippets of code directly to your website, you can manage them all in one place. GTM uses “tags” (the code snippets you want to fire), “triggers” (the conditions that define when tags to fire), and “variables” (placeholders for information GTM needs). This approach is highly flexible and reduces the need for constant developer support.
Google Tag (gtag.js): For simpler conversion tracking requirements or if you prefer a direct approach without GTM, you can implement conversion tracking using Google Tag. This method involves placing the global tag snippet and event-specific snippets directly on your website. While less flexible than GTM for managing multiple tags, it’s a quick and effective way to track conversion events and send conversion data to Google Analytics and Google Ads simultaneously.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for Data Collection: Regardless of whether you use GTM or the Google Tag, GA4 is the warehouse that collects and processes your conversion data. In GA4, everything is an event, and you can mark specific events, such as a form_submit or purchase, as a conversion (now “key event”). This allows you to centralize your data and understand how different traffic sources, campaigns or web pages contribute to your business goals.
Leveraging Built-in E-commerce Tracking: For platforms like Shopify, conversion tracking is often integrated directly into the system. These platforms can be configured to automatically send standard e-commerce events (like purchase, add_to_cart, and checkout_started) directly to your GA4 property without the need for manual setup of GTM tags for tracking conversions.

Sending Conversion Data to Advertising Platforms

Once your conversion events are defined and tracked, you can use them to feed and optimize your advertising efforts. A key advantage of using the Google ecosystem is that conversions defined in GA4 can be directly imported into Google Ads.

For other platforms like LinkedIn, Meta, and X you will use GTM to deploy their specific conversion tags (e.g., the LinkedIn Insight Tag or Meta Pixel). These tags can fire based on the same triggers you set up for your GA4 events, ensuring your conversion data is consistent across platforms. By feeding this data back, you enable the platforms’ machine learning algorithms to automatically optimize your campaigns to find more users who are likely to convert, ultimately maximizing your return on investment (ROI).

A Note on Enhanced Conversions: For Google Ads, an additional step you can take is implementing enhanced conversions. This feature works by securely using hashed first-party data (like email addresses) from your conversion events to match with signed-in Google users. This provides a more accurate conversion measurement and a fuller view of your customer journey, especially in a world with increasing privacy restrictions and cookie limitations. Enhanced conversions help close the gaps that traditional tracking methods may leave, giving the Google Ads algorithm better data to optimize your campaigns effectively.

Common Conversion Tracking Mistakes To Avoid

Even for experienced marketers, conversion tracking can sometimes be really challenging. Here are some common pitfalls and tips to avoid them:

Data Discrepancies Between Platforms: It’s normal to see differences in reported conversions between GA4 and Google Ads. These gaps often come from differences in attribution models, reporting windows, or how each platform processes data. Instead of stressing about mismatched numbers, focus on understanding why the discrepancies exist and use each platform for its strengths.
Overlooking Micro-Conversions: Marketers often fixate only on “big” conversions, like quote and demo requests, or purchases. But smaller actions – such as downloading a brochure, watching a product video, or spending time on key pages – can reveal how prospects move through the funnel. Tracking these micro-conversions provides a fuller picture of user intent and helps you optimize earlier touchpoints.
Inconsistent Naming Conventions: Without a clear system for naming events, tags, and triggers, your tracking setup quickly becomes messy and hard to maintain. A simple, consistent naming convention (e.g., contact_form_submit, quote_request, view_services_button_click) keeps your data clean and makes it easier for everyone to understand it.
Double-Counting Conversions: A common but overlooked mistake is firing the same conversion tag multiple times – for example, when a form submission reloads the page and triggers the same conversion hit twice, or when both GA4 and Google Ads tags are set to fire for the same action without proper configuration. Always test your setup in GTM’s preview mode to make sure each conversion is counted properly. Note that this rule applies only to events meant to be counted once (such as form submissions, downloads, and sign-ups). For repeatable events like “add to cart” or “purchase”, it’s correct (and expected) to record a conversion each time the event occurs.
Misaligned Conversion Goals: Not every tracked action is equally valuable. If you optimize your campaigns toward the wrong goals – say, demo video plays instead of qualified demo requests – you risk wasting budget on “easy” conversions that don’t meaningfully contribute to generating revenue. Always align your primary conversion goals with real business objectives, while keeping micro-conversions as supportive signals.
Bot Traffic and Fake Conversions: Automated bot activity can trigger events and inflate your conversion numbers, making it seem like campaigns are performing better than they really are. A red flag is when you see sudden spikes in low-quality leads or unusual patterns of behaviour, such as forms filled with fake names, random characters, or suspicious email addresses. To deal with it, you can try enabling bot filtering in GA4 and consider using tools like ClickCease that help block fake traffic before it skews your data.
Consent and Privacy Considerations: Depending on your market, user consent may be a regulatory requirement (e.g., GDPR in the EU). Even outside regulated regions, it’s still a good practice to be transparent about data collection and provide users with clear choices. Tools like GTM’s Consent Mode can help you manage this process smoothly while also reinforcing trust with your audience.

How Conversion Tracking Proves Marketing ROI: An Illustrative Example

Let’s imagine a life science company, “BioTech Innovations,” that wants to increase lead generation for a new line of laboratory instruments, including a high-throughput DNA sequencer, while keeping cost per lead at a reasonable level.

The Problem

BioTech Innovations is spending $5,000 per month on Google Ads to drive traffic to their website and generate leads. Their ad budget is split equally between two main campaigns:

One targeting broad, general keywords like “genomic research tools”, and,
Another targeting specific, high-intent keywords like “DNA sequencer for research”.

While they generate a steady flow of qualified leads, they have no clear visibility into which campaign is generating these leads and how much is the cost per lead in these campaigns.

The Solution

They implement a comprehensive conversion tracking setup using GTM and GA4.

GTM: They use GTM to create a GA4 event tag that captures all “Demo Request” form submissions on their website, sending each submission to GA4 as a demo_request event.
GA4: The demo_request event is marked as a key event, ensuring it’s tracked as a meaningful conversion in analytics.
Google Ads: This conversion event is imported into Google Ads and set as the primary goal. Both campaigns are then switched to the Maximize Conversions bid strategy, allowing Google to optimize performance specifically for the demo_request goal conversions.

The Results

After three months of conversion tracking, the data tells a clear story.

The campaign targeting broad, general keywords is generating 80% of the paid search traffic, but contributes only 15% of the demo_request conversions.
Conversely, the campaign targeting more specific, high-intent keywords, while driving less traffic, delivers more than 80% of the demo_request conversions at a moderately lower cost.

Based on these insights, BioTech Innovations reallocates 75% of its budget to the campaign with high-intent keywords. Within a few months:

Their overall cost per lead decreases by about 20%
Their monthly lead volume increases by roughly 25-30%

This data-driven decision transformed their marketing from guesswork into a more efficient, ROI-focused program. While the entire example is illustrative, the numbers and patterns are realistic and reflect what many companies experience after implementing conversion tracking.

Conclusion

Understanding which marketing efforts actually drive results is critical in life science marketing and that’s why data-driven strategies aren’t just an advantage, they’re an absolute necessity. Conversion tracking gives you the clarity you need to move beyond vanity metrics like clicks and impressions, and focus on what truly matters: qualified leads, sales opportunities, and measurable ROI.

With a properly set-up conversion tracking system, you’ll gain actionable insights into which marketing channels and campaigns are driving results. This enables smarter budget allocation, better campaign optimization for real results, and more predictable growth for your business.

At BioBM, we help life science companies put these systems in place and turn marketing data into actionable insights. If you’re ready to stop guessing and start proving your marketing ROI, get in touch with us today.

Google Performance Max Campaigns Make Revenue Attribution Critical for Life Science Marketers

Carlton Hoyt 11:19 pm , June 16, 2025

TL;DR Summary:

Performance Max campaigns are being promoted more aggressively to new advertisers.
While the setup of Performance Max campaigns may seem simple, life science marketers need to do the necessary groundwork to accurately track conversion value.
Google Ads’ AI will aggressively optimize for whatever goal it is set to.
Performance Max provide very little visibility into the audiences being targeted.
If life science marketers aren’t optimizing for actual business results, they will waste their ad budgets on ineffective campaigns.
We’ve seen Google’s attempts at self-optimization go wrong before …
… but executed correctly, Performance Max campaigns can significantly improve return on advertising spend (ROAS) compared to legacy Google Ads campaign types.

Google Ads AI is smart, but it’s your job to ensure it has the data it needs.

Google Ads AI: a Blessing and a Curse?

Performance Max (also known as PMax) a newer Google Ads campaign type which heavily leverages AI to achieve specific goals, such as sales, leads, or phone calls. By using all of Google’s advertising inventory, Performance Max campaigns often achieve a lower cost per action (CPA) than traditional search ad campaigns, and frequently even outperform retargeting campaigns in CPA. Performance Max campaigns are also wider-reaching, capable of advertising to customers through search, Google shopping, display, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, and the Discover feed on Android devices. They use the data you feed it through your conversion goals and Analytics connection, combined with Google’s own proprietary audience signals, to aggressively optimize for the stated goals. It will even mix-and-match ad assets to find the best performing combinations, create new ad assets for you, and find the best performing landing pages on your website. Sounds great, right?

It can be, but life science marketers who don’t have deep experience in Google Ads need to be careful. Performance Max campaigns are “black boxes” with limited visibility and control of keywords, placements, and audience targeting. Marketers who erroneously believe they can simply set up a Performance Max campaign, add some assets, and let Google’s AI handle the rest are going to burn money and see poor campaign performance. This is further complicated for many life science companies, which often conduct transactions partially or entirely offline (unlike e-commerce) and have complex buying cycles involving numerous stakeholders. As a result, revenue can be significantly disconnected from easily traceable online actions.

Furthermore, Google has not consistently proven that it is fluent in the language of the life sciences. We have seen this before, with product ads (for which Google chooses the keywords it believes to be relevant) for laboratory equipment showing in searches for drug paraphernalia and auto-applied recommendations jumbling search ad copy through obnoxious keyword stuffing devoid of context. I therefore do not recommend blindly trusting Google Ads without providing significant guidance – and for PMax campaigns, that guidance primarily comes from your conversion data.

Conversion Tracking vs. Revenue Tracking

Implementing comprehensive conversion tracking is much simpler than setting up revenue tracking and feeding actual data on conversion values back to Google Ads. Is conversion tracking alone sufficient for most life science organizations who want to use Performance Max campaigns? Almost never. The unusual exceptions are if you only sell through ecommerce or if all your conversions have approximately the same value. Therefore, life science marketers should do one of two things in order to property attribute sales data:

Get actual revenue data and feed it back to Google Analytics and / or Google Ads. Since almost all life science companies have offline sales, this requires having the proper technology implemented to correctly attribute sales data to leads and then send this data back to Google Ads. Many CRMs do this, for instance. If you do not have a CRM, you can achieve this yourself using the Google Ads API, but it is non-trivial to set up properly.
Estimate the average value for each type of conversion event whose value you can’t automatically track (i.e., all but ecommerce events) and add those conversion values to Google Ads / Google Analytics. This can be done in a number of ways, but using Google Tag Manager is often the simplest.

Failing to provide Google Ads with some measure conversion value will lead to your Performance Max campaigns optimizing solely for the number of conversions. This can lead Google Ads to inadvertently optimize for lower-value conversions, which frequently have a lower cost per acquisition.

PMax vs. Shopping Ads vs. Search Ads vs. Display Ads?

If you are curious which campaign is correct for you, there is no universal answer. You can scour the internet for data and case studies and find a lot of conflicting reports (and even more anecdotes devoid of data). Google Ads performance is so sector-specific and even business-specific that no blanket statement can be made. In our own experience, however, this is what we’ve found:

Performance Max campaigns get far more clicks at a much lower cost per click (CPC) but have considerably lower conversion rates and conversion values than search ads. PMax traffic tends to be lower-quality, which is to be expected. It’s hard to get better traffic quality than people who are in the process of looking for what you are selling. When using Performance Max ads to replace or supplement search ads, the objective is to get decent traffic quality at a low enough cost that the higher volume of PMax traffic compensates for its lower quality. Achieving this will depend on your specific circumstances and thoroughly optimizing your campaigns.
Since Performance Max campaigns recently added search terms reports, there is little practical difference between PMax and Google Shopping ads if you are using feed-only data. However, PMax also allows additional assets to provide more cross-platform exposure.There isn’t a definitive correct choice here, as shopping ads with Smart Bidding are extremely similar to PMax.
Display ads are almost functionally irrelevant after the launch of PMax. Even for display retargeting, PMax is often able to achieve better conversion rates. PMax almost always generates more traffic, typically of comparable quality to display ads. Costs are usually similar, although PMax campaigns can be somewhat higher than most display ad campaigns depending on your display ad targeting.

Again, this is in our own experience, which is strictly in marketing to life scientists and closely adjacent sectors. The only way to definitively determine if Performance Max campaigns will work for you is to test them.

Tips to Get Your Performance Max Campaigns Performing

Properly Establish Campaign Priority

Campaign priority can be directly set for campaigns with shopping ads. For search ads, it’s less simple: there are automatically applied prioritization rules you can’t easily get around. The rules summarize to this: if there is an exact match, regardless of whether the keyword rule used is exact match, then the campaign with the exact match will be used (which for PMax would need to be a search theme since keywords aren’t directly set). If there are no exact matches, then Google’s AI takes its best guess. If AI can’t figure it out, then Ad Rank is used. For display ads, expect PMax to get priority.

Don’t Allow PMax to Cannibalize Organic Leads

Some things you just don’t need to bid on. For instance, if no one is bidding on your branded terms (and even potentially if they are), you don’t need to be bidding on them either. Ads for branded terms will perform extremely well, however, so Performance Max campaigns will aggressively pursue them, causing you to spend money on leads you would have acquired anyway. Stop this unproductive behavior by setting negative keywords for branded terms.

Closely Monitor Keywords & Make Use of Negative Keywords

This is crucial for all Google Ads campaigns, but particularly for Shopping and PMax campaigns where direct keyword control is limited. Be vigilant about your keywords and proactive about setting negative keywords to prevent wasted ad spend on traffic that is irrelevant or low-value.

Use Audience Signals

One of the biggest gripes about Performance Max campaigns is traffic quality. Force Google’s AI to optimize for higher-value audiences by feeding it audience segments, customer lists and remarketing lists. (In our experience, PMax campaigns are particularly effective for remarketing. We’ve largely stopped using standalone Google Ads remarketing campaigns in favor of PMax.)

Keep a Close Eye on Low-Volume Campaigns

Google Ads’ AI needs enough data and signals to be able to optimize itself, or else it may not perform well. The key question is: how much data is enough? Smarter Ecommerce ran an ROAS test for PMax campaigns with different monthly conversions to measure how they performed. The result? Less than 30 conversions per month leads to poor performance and the performance gets better the more conversion data that Google Ads has to work with within the Performance Max campaign. Even campaigns with over 1000 conversions per month performed slightly better than those with 500 to 1000 conversions per month. Their takeaway was that 150+ conversions / month was the sweet spot. Less than that and it might not perform. It is noteworthy however that in their experiment the number of campaigns with “below target” ROAS declined rapidly as conversions per month increased, but those performing above target stayed roughly flat. If their data is to be believed (and it is from 14,000 campaigns), then there is a roughly 30% chance that PMax campaigns will perform well no matter how many conversions you have. Either that or there is something uncontrolled in the data regarding how highly converting companies vs. low converting companies set their target ROAS.

Chart from Smarter Ecommerce

Use PMax as a Supplement for Search and Shopping Campaigns

It’s easy for PMax campaigns to be wasteful and burn through ad budgets. Run PMax concurrently with search and shopping campaigns until it consistently demonstrates superior ROAS

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

This is not a recommendation which is specific to Performance Max campaigns, but it is especially important for Performance Max campaigns. Your manual optimization efforts are what will keep the guardrails on and help Google Ads’ AI better learn what works. Create diverse creative assets, replace periodically underperforming ones, A/B test, and run experiments.

Segment Your Campaigns … But Not Too Much

PMax campaigns perform best when segmentation is used intelligently to guide Google Ads into doing what you want. For campaigns without product feeds this could mean segmenting by geography, audience signals, “similar to” segments, lists, etc. For campaigns with product feeds, you may want to segregate your best performing products, segment by overarching product types, new vs. returning customers, etc. It is also recommended to have a “catch-all” segment to include offerings that fall outside of your defined segments. The best segmentation to use will depend on the nature of your business.

You’ll need to segment your asset groups as well and ensure you have appropriate ad assets for each segment. PMax is decent at figuring out what assets make sense with what products or landing pages, but ultimately you should take responsibility to ensure that you have sensible, coherent ads.

However you segment, be sure not to over segment. Remember that PMax needs enough data to optimize, and if you are hyper-segmenting to the point where many segments have relatively few conversions, Google Ads’ AI won’t be able to optimize your campaigns well.

The #1 Thing To Remember for PMax Campaigns

PMax can be a powerful addition to almost any life science Google Ads account – if done properly. The #1 thing to remember is that Google Ads’ AI can only optimize for what it has data on. Without accurate tracking of conversion values, Google may make assumptions or optimize for suboptimal actions, negatively impacting your campaigns. With proper tracking of conversion values, however, Performance Max campaigns can help unearth leads and customers that might be untargetable through other Google Ads campaign types while delivering low CPAs and high ROAS.

Blog / Demand Generation / Digital Marketing 11:19 pm , June 16, 2025

Scientists Hate AI Spam as Much as Old School Bulk Spam

Carlton Hoyt 6:08 pm , March 31, 2025

I’ve been getting AI generated spam for well over a year. It was immediately clear to me when it started. My spam emails became slightly more personalized than regular spam. They were all short: usually 2-4 sentences. The topics seemed to come in waves, all vaguely relevant to the owner of a small business or someone in marketing: there was the virtual assistant spam, the “do you want to sell your business” spam, and – my favorite – the AI generated spam selling AI generated spam tools. Most importantly: they were no less annoying to me than regular spam; unwanted and unsolicited interruptions in my day requiring me to manually mark them all as such.

Then, last week, something new happened. I got a very poorly targeted email from a life science company:

The notion that someone in life science marketing would want to buy genomes and metabolic pathways is ridiculous, but the real revelation was that the AI generated spam has penetrated into the life science market! This made me wonder if it’s changed people’s opinions about spam: after all, the whole point of AI generated spam is to replicate the more effective elements of one-to-one cold emailing. Perhaps improved personalization and relevance actually do make people more receptive to it.

Survey time!

The only way to answer the question is to ask. We posted a simple poll to the LabRats subreddit asking if they get AI-generated spam from scientific suppliers. I don’t think the result should be considered surprising:

A little over half the respondents report getting AI generated spam from scientific suppliers, and of those people almost all of them dislike it as much as regular spam.

What should we learn from this?

AI isn’t a magic bullet. It just makes bulk unsolicited emails a lot easier. Rented lists and low-cost bulk email service providers did too, and a lot of companies used them until deliverability plummeted and marketers realized that the costs to their brand’s reputation weren’t worth it.

Cold emails can be highly effective when executed correctly, with genuine, meaningful personalization and hyper-targeted sales pitches. It’s probable that AI sales tools will get to the point where they can do that, but the current iterations of generic AI sales tools just aren’t there. Like the bulk spam before it, we expect that AI spam will be increasingly, and preemptively, relegated to spam folders as mail servers slowly but surely learn that no one wants it.

"More effective outreach to life scientists starts with BioBM. Our efficient and forward-looking demand generation strategies give life science companies the edge to get ahead and stay ahead. Whether you want productive outbound campaigns or efficient inbound funnels, BioBM can get you generating more leads and growing your revenues and profitability. Get started today."

Blog / Digital Marketing / Marketing Communications 6:08 pm , March 31, 2025

Supercharge Your Google Ads With Every Possible Extension

Željislav Petrovič 9:29 am , February 19, 2025

Life science companies constantly face numerous challenges in capturing their audience’s attention on crowded search engine result pages (SERPs) with Google Ads. To make their ads stand out and attract their scientific audiences it is essential to present key information in a clear and engaging way. That’s where Google’s ad extensions (now called assets) come in as a game changer. They transform the ads from simple, inconspicuous text into rich, informative experiences by making them more noticeable, valuable, and engaging for the viewer.

By leveraging a variety of ad extensions, you can present all crucial information related to the products or services you promote (from unique product features to product variants/service packages with pricing, physical locations, and more) directly on the search results page. In this post, we’ll explore the different types of ad extensions, their benefits, and the best practices that can help you maximize the impact of your Google search marketing ads and most effectively gain the attention of your life science audience.

The Benefits of Using Ad Extensions in Google Ads

Maximizing the use of ad extensions in Google Ads has multiple benefits for life science marketers, including:

Increased Visibility: Extensions make your ads larger and more prominent on the search results page, capturing more attention from viewers.
Higher Click-Through Rate (CTR): By adding more hyperlinks and valuable information to your ads, extensions provide users with more reasons to click, resulting in a higher CTR.
Enhanced Ad Rank: Ad extensions contribute positively to Google’s Ad Rank formula, leading to improved ad positions and potentially lower costs per click.
Improved Relevance: Extensions allow you to tailor your ads to specific user searches, increasing relevance and engagement.
Better User Experience: By providing quick and easy access to relevant information, extensions improve the user experience and encourage interaction.

Overview of Google Ads Extensions and Their Suitability for Life Science Companies

To help you prioritize which ad extensions will deliver the most impact for your campaigns, we’ve split them into two categories: All-Stars: Must-Have Extensions and Other Extensions to Consider. This will make it easier to focus your efforts on the extensions that will likely yield the best results for you, while keeping additional options in mind to experiment with as needed.

All-Stars: Must-Have Extensions

1. Sitelink Extensions

What It Is: Sitelink extensions are additional links (clickable text assets with headline and description) that appear below your ad, helping users navigate directly to specific pages or sections they may want to browse on your site.
Use Cases: Link to individual product or service pages, collection / category pages, a contact page, quote request page, or page with downloadable content. This allows users to navigate directly to relevant content, decreasing bounce rates while improving engagement and conversion rates.
Who Should Use It: Companies with multiple landing pages that highlight various aspects of their offerings, showcase specific products or services, provide access to valuable resources like case studies and white papers, or allow users to take meaningful action.

*Example of Sitelink extensions for a distributor of lab homogenizers*

2. Callout Extensions

What It Is: Callout extensions are short, non-clickable descriptive text snippets that allow you to highlight the key product/service attributes and benefits within your ad.
Use Cases: You can use callout extensions to emphasize distinctive qualities, such as unique product/service features, certifications, warranties, fast shipping, or the availability of expert support.
Who Should Use It: Companies with differentiating product or service attributes that aren’t easily conveyed in the main ad text should consider using callouts to highlight these strengths.

Example of Callout extensions *for a distributor of lab homogenizers*

3. Structured Snippet Extensions

What It Is: Structured Snippet extensions allow you to showcase specific aspects of your products or services in structured text format. Unlike Callout extensions, which highlight key benefits, Structured Snippets present categorized details like product types, or service packages, to clarify the offerings in the ad.
Use Cases: Use structured snippets to list various product types you offer (e.g., “Cell Counters,” “Microplate Readers,” “Triple Quad LC-MS”) or the exact services you provide (e.g., “Cell Line Development,” “In Situ RNA Seq” “Bespoke Oncology Models”).
Who Should Use It: Companies with a broad product line or service catalog that want to showcase a variety of options directly in the ad, making it easy for users to see their range of offerings at a glance.

Example of Structured Snippet extensions *for a distributor of lab homogenizers*

4. Call Extensions

What It Is: Call extensions are special assets that display a clickable phone number in your ad, encouraging users to contact your sales or support team directly from the ad.
Use Cases: Sometimes a scientist wants to get straight to the point. Call extensions facilitate direct contact, enabling outreach directly from the ad.
Who Should Use It: Companies with dedicated sales teams who have a consultative sales process.

Example of Call extension *for a distributor of lab homogenizers*

These are the extensions that should be prioritized in your Google Ads campaigns, as they significantly enhance the relevance, engagement, and performance of your ads.

Other Extensions to Consider

1. Location Extensions

What It Is: Location extensions allow you to display your physical business address, a map link, and distance (if applicable) to your location from the searcher’s location in the search results, which helps potential customers to easily find and visit your physical location.
Use Cases: When you serve customers in specific locations, you can use this type of extension to show your business locations on the map..
Who Should Use It: Companies that have brick-and-mortar locations that clients may visit (such as company headquarters, laboratories, research facilities, or regional distributors) can use this extension to demonstrate convenience and reassurance of local availability while improving ad relevance. For companies which only deal with customers remotely, this is less relevant.

Example of Location extension for a provider of lab instrument services

2. Image Extensions

What It Is: Image extensions allow you to add visually compelling images to your ads, which can significantly enhance the appearance of your ads and make them more engaging.
Use Cases: You can use image extensions to visually showcase your products, team, facilities, software/app in action, or feature scientific images related to your scientific specialty.
Who Should Use It: Companies that have a strong collection of images related to their products / services and want to provide potential clients with a quick visual preview of their offerings in the ads.

Example of Image extension for *a distributor of lab homogenizers*

3. Lead Form Extensions

What It Is: Lead form extensions allow users to submit their information and sign up for something you offer directly through the ad without leaving the search results page.
Use Cases: Capture leads directly on the search results page using Google Ads’ built-in forms, allowing users to request more information, sign up for demos, or access downloadable content like whitepapers, application notes, or brochures.
Who Should Use It: Companies focused on lead generation, whether by providing high-value downloadable resources, offering product demos or simply making it easier for potential customers to get in touch.

*Example of Lead Form extension for a supplier of cell imaging systems*

4. Price Extensions

What It Is: Price extensions allow you to showcase a list of products or services with pricing right below your ad, giving potential customers instant visibility into the price of your offerings.
Use Cases: Provide potential customers with a quick cost estimate of your offerings by displaying the exact prices of individual featured products and product variants or starting prices of specific product types, product lines, and service packages within your ad.
Who Should Use It: Companies with standardized product/service prices, especially those that list a wide range of products or service packages on their website and do direct sales through the site.

Example of Price extensions for *a distributor of lab homogenizers*

5. Promotion Extensions

What It Is: Promotion extensions allow you to highlight special offers, discounts, or limited-time deals directly in your ad, making it easier for potential customers to see and take advantage of your promotions.
Use Cases: These extensions can be used to highlight promotional offers with monetary or percentage-based discounts alongside your ad, and attract users looking for special deals.
Who Should Use It: Companies that sell tangible products, software/app subscriptions, or service packages online and run promotions with limited-time discounts.

Example of Promotion extensions *for a distributor of lab homogenizers*

6. App Extensions

What It Is: App extensions allow you to embed a direct link for downloading your mobile app into the ad, making it easy for users to install and access your app without the need to visit your site first.
Use Cases: If you offer mobile apps (such as LIMS, ELNs, reference management apps, or other apps that support research work), you can use this extension to promote your app within the ad and drive downloads for your app.
Who Should Use It: Companies offering iOS or Android apps designed for scientists, especially those offering subscription-based apps or free apps that provide them with downstream marketing opportunities.

*Example of App extension for a vendor of* Android/iOS app

Best Practices for Using Ad Extensions in Life Science Campaigns

To maximize your ad extensions’ potential, make sure to follow these best practices:

1. Choose the Extensions Based on Your Campaign Goal

Not all ad extensions will be relevant to your campaign and business type. For instance, if you’re promoting an automated cell counter and your campaign objective is lead generation, callout extensions can highlight key features like high accuracy and speed, while a lead form extension can help capture leads from researchers interested in learning more. Make sure to align extensions with your objectives, whether it is generating leads, driving sales, or increasing website visits.

2. Use Extensions That Are Concise and Compelling

Scientists often scan information quickly, so it’s crucial to use ad extensions that are direct, clear, and impactful. Instead of long, generic phrases, focus on specific, concise, benefit-driven messaging. For example, rather than “Advanced Cell Counting Technology,” try “Fast & Accurate Cell Counting”’ to immediately convey value. Keep language precise and focused on what will resonate with your audience.

3. Tailor Extensions to Your Target Audience

Different audience segments within life sciences have different intentions and respond to different messaging. For example, if you’re targeting an audience with more scientific queries, sitelink extensions could lead to a white paper showcasing your technology, while for an audience with more commercial queries, they could lead to a case study showing improved results or cost savings. By aligning extensions with keyword intent, you can ensure your ads deliver the most relevant content to each audience segment.

4. Keep Extensions Fresh and Up To Date

Outdated extensions can lead to poor user experiences, negatively impacting ad performance and overall results. Make sure to regularly review and update all extensions you use, especially price extensions that should display valid product prices, promotion extensions that should reflect current special offers and discounts, and sitelink extensions that should direct people to up-to-date pages with useful resources.

5. Monitor Performance and Measure the Success of Extensions

Just like ad copy and keywords, ad extensions should be periodically evaluated for effectiveness. Use Google Ads performance reports to track and see which extensions drive the most clicks and conversions and which extensions do not generate any results. For example, if a callout extensions about key product features have a low engagement rate, consider testing different wording or replacing it with a more relevant extension. If your performance reports show that certain price or sitelink extensions drive meaningful results, try creating more extensions like these.

6. A/B Test Different Extensions and Messaging

Not all extensions will perform equally well in every campaign. To optimize performance and get the most from your ad extensions, continuously experiment with different extension types and messaging. For instance, test variations of callout extensions to see which callouts work best for your audience, or compare lead form extensions with sitelink extensions to determine which drives more conversions. Continuous testing and refining of your extensions will help you maximize ad visibility and engagement.

Following these practices will ensure you get the most out of your ad extensions. The ad relevance will be drastically improved, and you will see better engagement rates and more conversions coming from your campaigns.

Conclusion

Ad extensions provide a powerful way for life science marketers to enhance their Google Ads, providing more value to viewers, improving engagement, and ultimately driving more qualified leads or sales. After leveraging various extension types that are suitable for the products or services you promote and aligned with campaign goals, you will create a richer, more informative and engaging ad experience that resonates with audiences from the life science industry. Ready to supercharge your Google Ads campaigns with ad extensions? Contact BioBM for a customized Google Ads strategy tailored to the unique needs of your business.

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Blog / Digital Marketing / Search Marketing 9:29 am , February 19, 2025