Free VBB assessment: find the gaps in your value-based bidding
VBB Assessment
Free, every timeFind the gaps in your value-based bidding.
Ten questions across the five areas where lead-gen bidding goes wrong. Free, two minutes, nothing to upload.
- Pinpoint which of the five areas is costing you
- See what to do in each one, and what to do first
- Then check the answer against your own CRM data
- 5
- areas
- 10
- questions
- 2
- minutes
- 0
- cost
To begin
Who do you sell to?
Three of the ten questions change with the answer. No card, no call, no trial.
The framework
The five areas
Value-based bidding fails in five distinct places, and an account can be strong in four of them and still bid on the wrong leads because of the fifth. The assessment scores each on its own so the weak one is visible.
- 1
Campaign structure and budget
Whether your campaigns are shaped so Smart Bidding can learn what a good lead looks like, and whether each one sees enough volume to learn at all.
- 2
Conversion tracking and value setup
What you count as a conversion, and whether the number attached to it says anything about what the lead turned out to be worth.
- 3
Data integration and automation
Whether your CRM outcomes reach the ad platform at all, how quickly, and whether a person has to do it by hand each time.
- 4
Value modelling and signal strategy
Whether the values you send are differentiated by what you know about a lead, and whether they are built from closed business rather than assumption.
- 5
Creative and audience strategy
Whether the rest of the account works with the bidding: excluding traffic that teaches it the wrong lesson, and speaking to the segments that pay.
- Run the diagnostic instead
What it is not
A measurement. The score is built from what you say about your setup, which is why it takes two minutes and why it ends by offering to check. The diagnostic reads your CRM export and reports what your leads have actually been worth, group by group.
What a score means
Each area, and the setup as a whole, is an open gap, partly covered, or covered. The cut-offs are not even thirds on purpose: half marks describes a setup that sends values it cannot defend, and covered should mean something.
Gap
Under 40%The area is working against your bidding, or not working at all. Start here.
Overall, Your bidding is optimising for activity rather than value. Google is being told that every lead is worth the same, so it buys whichever ones are cheapest to get, and the difference between a lead that closes and one that never answers the phone is invisible to it. Nothing here is unusual, and it is the state most lead-gen accounts are in. The first move is not a new platform, it is getting one real number attached to each lead.
Partly covered
40% to 74%Something is in place, and it is holding the rest back. Usually one decision away.
Overall, You are sending value, and the plumbing largely works. What is missing is evidence behind the numbers: values that were decided rather than measured, or measured once and never revisited. That puts a ceiling on what Smart Bidding can do, because it optimises faithfully towards whatever you told it, including the parts you guessed. The gap between here and the top level is almost always the model, not the integration.
Covered
75% and aboveWorking with the bidding rather than against it. Maintenance, not construction.
Overall, You are doing what most lead-gen advertisers are not: pricing leads from outcomes and feeding those values back where bidding can use them. The work left is maintenance rather than construction. Value models go stale as the business changes, and a model fitted last spring can be quietly pricing this autumn's leads on rules that stopped being true. Worth checking what a refit on current data would change.
Before you start
- How long does it take?
- About two minutes. Ten questions, three answers each, and the result appears on the last one.
- Do I need to share anything?
- A name and a work email to see the result, no password and no card, on the same free workspace the diagnostic uses. Nothing to upload. The answers themselves stay in your browser.
- Is it really free?
- Yes. No card, no trial and no call. So is the diagnostic it leads to, which reads your own CRM export in your browser and never stores it.
How the score is worked out
Two questions per area, each with three answers worth 0, 1 or 2 points. An area is scored out of 4 and the whole out of 20, both reported as a percentage. Nothing is weighted, because a weighting would be a claim about which area matters most, and there is no evidence in ten answers for one. Three of the ten questions differ between business and consumer advertisers: a company has an account type to price on, a household has a lifetime instead, and a B2B account rarely has the volume to segment campaigns without starving each of the conversions Smart Bidding needs.
The answers stay in your browser; the result is shown once a free workspace exists, which is the same signup the diagnostic asks for. For the reasoning behind each area, the complete guide to value-based bidding for lead generation covers all five, and whether your CRM data can support it is the question most accounts with open gaps need answered first.