Guidable primarily operates a job site for foreign residents in Japan.
As contributors to the Japanese economy’s growth, foreign residents play a crucial role in supporting the country’s development. Guidable’s mission is to eliminate any inconvenience they may face due to their nationality. Driven by this vision, Guidable provides services that support foreigners in their work and daily lives.
Recently, Guidable introduced our new service, "Fake Lead Protection." In this article, we explore the key factors that led to a significant ROI improvement of 152%.
We spoke with Mr. Matsui from Guidable’s Marketing Department about the results following the implementation.
Challenges in Guidable’s Advertising Operations
Firstly, could you tell us about your current role at Guidable?
Our company mainly operates a job site targeting foreign residents in Japan. In addition, we run several other businesses, including a job platform for hiring foreign workers with specific skills and a research and promotion support service for foreign audiences.
My primary role in joining Guidable was to increase the number of foreign job seekers. Over two years, I focused on ad operations and SEO, successfully tripling the number of job applications.
Tripling job applications in just two years is impressive! Despite your strong performance, have you faced any challenges?
Yes, we had two major challenges:
- Due to the impact of COVID-19, the number of leads and contracts we could secure through traditional sales methods declined.
- As market competition intensified year after year, we struggled to differentiate ourselves from competitors.
In the first few years after launching our business, we increased our contracts through inbound leads and sales efforts. However, around 2020, the number of leads decreased due to COVID-19. To solve this, we strengthened our web marketing efforts, focusing on web advertising and SEO.
Initially, when we launched web advertising, there were relatively few competitors in the market, so the cost-per-click (CPC) was not very high. However, in recent years, CPC has been rising by about ¥100 every year.
▼ CPC Trend Chart
With CPC increasing yearly, it must be challenging to acquire more conversions with the same budget.
Exactly. As our competitors increased their ad budgets, we realized that simply improving ad volume and creatives wasn’t enough. We needed a clear differentiator to stay competitive.
Addressing Challenges in Web Advertising, SEO, and CRM Tools
You mentioned utilizing web advertising, SEO, and CRM tools. What challenges have you faced, and how did you solve them?
We focused primarily on web advertising and CRM tool utilization.
One of the key challenges we faced was identifying "successful patterns" in web advertising. Simply running ads and counting valid leads wasn’t enough—we needed to determine which keywords and creatives contributed to actual conversions.
To address this, we integrated our web advertising results with our CRM, analyzing commonalities among leads that converted and exploring the best sales approaches. This data-driven marketing approach allowed us to optimize our efforts.
Identifying where the conversions happen and where users drop off is crucial. How did you define and set key performance indicators (KPIs)?
We made a strategic decision to align our Key Goal Indicators (KGI) across teams.
For example, we unified the KGI of our sales and marketing teams under "contract revenue." Previously, the marketing team focused on lowering cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and increasing lead volume. However, many of these leads had low conversion potential, leading to a disconnect between marketing efforts and actual business results.
By unifying the KGI, both teams aligned their perspectives, making strategy-sharing more efficient and leading to better outcomes.
Aligning KGI across teams sounds challenging, but it’s great to see that it led to real results. Do you use this approach beyond the sales team?
Yes. For our B2C business, we also aligned the KGI between the marketing team and the customer success (CS) team, setting "the number of hires made by client companies" as a shared goal.
Initially, the marketing team’s KGI focused on job applications and CPA, so shifting to "number of hires" was a significant challenge. However, by ensuring that everyone understood the company’s fundamental objectives, we refined our strategies accordingly.
As a result, we gained insights into how to approach repeat clients and which types of job seekers were most likely to be hired. This shift ultimately led to positive business outcomes.
Fake Lead Protection: Strengthening Data-Driven Marketing
You mentioned low-quality leads—were you also seeing fraudulent leads?
Yes. From September to November 2024, we noticed a surge in fraudulent leads from search ads, particularly spam leads from non-target audiences.
The accumulation of these fraudulent leads deteriorated the accuracy of the ad platform’s machine learning, creating a vicious cycle: as fake leads increased, valid business negotiations declined, worsening our lead acquisition cost.
At that time, Spider’s Fake Lead Protection was introduced to us. Within just two months of implementation, we saw significant improvements.
Specifically, compared to pre-implementation:
- The ad platform’s machine learning normalized.
- The number of valid leads increased.
- ROI improved by 152%.
(▼ Additional Explanation of the Following Data)
- A surge in fraudulent leads from search ads made countermeasures urgent.
- Spider AF was introduced in December 2024 to tackle fake lead issues.
- After implementing Fake Lead Protection, fraudulent leads disappeared.
- As ad platform machine learning improved, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) increased, leading to more effective business negotiations.
- CPC, which had surged due to search partner ads, decreased.
How did you detect fraudulent leads? What criteria did you use?
We identified fraudulent leads based on two key factors:
- A sudden spike in leads from keywords that historically generated few leads.
- A rapid increase in leads from overseas audiences outside our target market.
Before introducing Fake Lead Protection, we attempted to filter fraudulent leads through form settings on our landing pages, but this wasn’t sufficient. That led us to adopt Spider’s tool.
The Danger of Relying Solely on Machine Learning
Your results show that Fake Lead Protection significantly reduced fraudulent leads, lowered CPC, and increased MQLs and valid leads. This highlights the importance of quality data for ad platform machine learning.
Exactly. In recent times, machine learning results can fluctuate drastically over short periods (weeks or even a month), making it crucial to take proactive measures.
Final Message from Guidable
Lastly, is there anything you’d like to share with our readers?
In addition to eliminating invalid clicks, it’s essential to focus on acquiring leads that actually convert and improve ad precision. For that, feeding the right data into ad platforms is critical. From this perspective, Fake Lead Protection is a must-have tool.
Lastly, our company operates multiple businesses catering to foreign residents in Japan. If you have any related needs, we encourage you to check us out and feel free to reach out.
Guidable is committed to supporting foreign residents in Japan, ensuring they face no inconvenience due to their nationality, and helping them in their work and daily lives.
