Keap goes all in on Google to help small businesses grow
About Keap
Keap provides the technology and services that help small businesses succeed. Keap delivers an all-in-one CRM, sales, and marketing automation solution to help its customers win more business.
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Contact usKeap selected Google Cloud initially to overcome scalability issues related to on-premises data centers. Moving to the cloud helped Keap overcome these challenges and provided access to a variety of Google Cloud products to improve its entire business.
A passion for driving small business success
As a provider of sales and marketing automation, combining CRM, marketing automation, sales automation and ecommerce, Keap prides itself on building technology that accelerates small business growth. Keap also provides the support, coaching, and partners that its customers need to succeed in entrepreneurship.
Today, more than 200,000 users count on Keap to provide what other vendors can’t: always-on uptime and continuity, consulting, and support that is mission-critical to business. Small businesses know that Keap is so much more than just software. Keap is their system of record and an important part of their business.
“The Google Cloud team really impressed us with their overall flexibility and commitment to our success. Our employees made it clear that they wanted to work with the Google Cloud team, especially because they were so passionate about helping us meet our specific needs. This partnership approach has proven to be true in all aspects of our interactions with the Google Cloud team.”
—Clate Mask, CEO & co-founder, KeapA win-win cloud opportunity
Recently, Keap reached the point where it realized it needed to address the challenges related to managing on-premises data centers and disparate technologies in its infrastructure. More specifically, it was beginning to take too much time, effort, and cost to scale compute resources to keep up with growing customer demand—time that Keap’s engineering teams could be spending on DevOps to modernize Keap’s own applications and technologies.
The company was also looking to improve security and redundancy in its architecture, and at the same time, Keap’s leadership team was intrigued by the business potential of several new and emerging cloud products. Keap decided that moving to a cloud-hosted compute environment would give it the best of both worlds: a better way to overcome challenges caused by on-premises infrastructure and a way to reap powerful new benefits to improve the overall business.
Keap evaluated the leading cloud vendors and quickly selected Google Cloud because it offered the most cost-effective pricing, the highest security possible, and the best options to work with Keap’s open source products. Google Cloud also stood out in one other important area: its people. “The Google Cloud team really impressed us with their overall flexibility and commitment to our success,” said Clate Mask, CEO and co-founder of Keap. “Our employees made it clear that they wanted to work with the Google Cloud team, especially because they were so passionate about helping us meet our specific needs. This partnership approach has proven to be true in all aspects of our interactions with the Google Cloud team.”
“Moving to the cloud definitely improved our uptime and helped us add capacity in a much more efficient way. In addition, we benefited from cost savings over our on-premises model, and moving to the cloud has given us much more confidence in the long-term scalability of our operations and much more peace of mind.”
—Clate Mask, CEO & co-founder, KeapKeap’s cloud strategy pays off
Keap used a lift-and-shift approach to replicate its on-premises workloads, data stores, and infrastructure in Google Cloud. Specifically, the company used Compute Engine to give users a faster, more efficient way to spin up virtual machines on-demand and App Engine to give Keap a better way to develop and host web applications in Google Cloud—managed data centers.
“Many of our engineers liked developing solutions on App Engine,” said Joseph Mask, Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Keap. “When we evaluated public cloud providers for migrating all workloads from data centers to the public cloud, Google did a much better job helping us identify our path to successful migration and operation on Google Cloud.”
After a transition that Clate Mask calls “remarkably smooth,” Keap immediately began to reap significant business benefits. First, Keap took advantage of Google Cloud’s support of common tooling and open source capabilities that allowed technical resources to use existing skills and not have to implement and learn a completely new technology stack.
Additionally, this approach helped the company eliminate the need for disparate technologies and streamline the efforts needed to manage them all. Now Keap could easily scale its infrastructure to support business applications or meet spikes in traffic or demand, and it could do so without having to wonder if it had the right staff on hand or if they had the right skills, training, or qualifications. The fact that Keap could offload all this to a single cloud vendor helped the company minimize day-to-day management burden—and the overall risk to the business.
“Moving to the cloud definitely improved our uptime and helped us add capacity in a much more efficient way,” explained Mask. “In addition, we benefited from cost savings over our on-premises model, and moving to the cloud has given us much more confidence in the long-term scalability of our operations and much more peace of mind.”
“We get 18 billion API calls from partners using API-building extensions. Before we started working with Google Cloud, we used a different API management platform, but it simply couldn’t keep up with such high traffic. I knew that we would be able to benefit from a far better API gateway tool like Apigee, which is one of the reasons why we were so excited to partner with Google Cloud.”
—Rajesh Bhatia, Chief Technology Officer, KeapMonetizing APIs with Apigee
Keap was also able to use Google Cloud’s Apigee API Management Platform to improve the way its teams design, secure, and manage their APIs—and create new experiences its customers love. Before using Apigee, Keap had different policies for each API, and every team took a different approach to developing and managing individual APIs. Keap needed an API platform that could streamline and standardize development processes and enable developers to apply global security policies and other controls.
With Apigee, Keap gained a hosted environment that gives developers a better way to build apps and services and then create and manage effective APIs for them. It used to be a significant effort, but now Apigee delivers meaningful benefits.
“We get 18 billion API calls from partners using API-building extensions,” said Rajesh Bhatia, Keap’s Chief Technology Officer. “Before we started working with Google Cloud, we used a different API management platform, but it simply couldn’t keep up with such high traffic. I knew that we would be able to benefit from a far better API gateway tool like Apigee, which is one of the reasons why we were so excited to partner with Google Cloud.”
Keap is now better able to monitor, throttle, and watch partners’ use of APIs. Keap’s partners have noticed enhancements related to speed and performance—up to two to three times faster according to Bhatia. He also explains that with Apigee, Keap is currently exploring new ways to monetize its API traffic, an entirely new revenue stream. The company is evaluating a number of API-monetization strategies, such as charging for the API, using APIs to drive traffic to its marketplace, upselling premium subscription packages, and other revenue-generating opportunities.
Improved marketing results and a better customer experience
Once the migration was complete, Keap began discovering additional ways it could use Google products—beyond Google Cloud—to improve its business processes and help its employees become more efficient and effective. For example, the demand-generation team needed a better way to manage the performance of digital marketing campaigns, and turned to Google Analytics, Google Ads, and YouTube.
Alex Edlund, Keap’s Head of Demand Generation, described the benefits of using these tools for his marketing efforts. “With Google, I have the ability to run sophisticated marketing campaigns using the entire Google ecosystem, including YouTube, the Google Display Network, Discovery Ads, and even the Gmail messaging app. We’ve been able to integrate first-party data into Google Analytics 360 to gain a more complete picture about traffic conversion.”
Edlund highlighted one approach that worked especially well. “We used search intent on YouTube to run extremely successful campaigns. By starting with search data, we can identify keywords related to a particular product, such as ‘CRM marketing automation software’ and apply that targeting on YouTube. It’s more effective because audiences have already searched for something related to those keywords, so in a way, it’s almost like search retargeting on the YouTube platform. It’s been extremely effective for us.”
Keap also uses Google Workspace within its own CRM product. For example, many of Keap’s small business customers already use Google Calendar or Gmail. This integration makes Keap’s CRM solution much more effective since customers can send emails and schedule follow-up appointments on their Google Calendar directly within the Keap CRM.
Complete insight, complete control
Before working with Google Cloud, Keap’s internal team of business analysts supported all parts of the organization using a largely manual approach to analytics and reports. This effort generally consisted of pulling data from various sources and manually cobbling them together. Not only was this process time consuming and inefficient, but it only provided visibility into what had already happened—not the real-time insights Keap needed to quickly react and drive the business forward.
In order to give its analysts valuable time back while also increasing employee access to trusted and actionable insights, Keap decided to modernize their data stack to help identify areas for increased efficiency and opportunity throughout the business. In this case, Keap selected BigQuery, Google Cloud’s serverless, multicloud data warehouse, to store and analyze data. The Keap team also selected Looker’s modern business intelligence platform to provide self-service access to consistent and actionable metrics.
While Keap initially considered building a data platform in-house to ensure they could customize it to meet their needs, with Looker they found they were able to leverage the power already built into the platform while still maintaining the control and customization they wanted to define metrics and deliver dashboards and data across the business.
Since deploying Looker, teams across the business have been able to harness the power of data to do their jobs better. The data analysts have gained valuable time back, which they can now put towards more complex analysis and improving the overall business. For example, Keap has transformed its data team from a cost center to a team focused on revenue-generating opportunities, such as implementing an embedded analytics solution to give them a valuable upsell opportunity with customers and enhance overall customer satisfaction.
“Looker has been fantastic in giving us clear dashboards, making it available on mobile devices, and providing the right data to the right people at the right time,” said Clate Mask. “We’ve been so pleased with Looker in terms of what it has meant for us and even new use cases for how it can help us solve customers’ problems. I think we’re really in the beginning stages of seeing the benefits of this technology with Google Cloud.”
The road ahead
Keap is currently planning a move to Google Kubernetes Engine to take advantage of an open source container orchestration platform and improve the way users deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. Keap is confident that the use of containers and microservices will provide much more visibility into specific products, services, and applications, which will be critical in minimizing potential degradation or disruption of service.
As Keap looks ahead, CEO and co-founder Clate Mask likes the opportunities he sees. “We can continue to do so much more with the various Google Cloud products to be able to provide better services to our customers. Google Cloud offers so many different options, which makes it much easier to work with just one vendor to get outstanding value. Working with Google Cloud has not been like a typical vendor relationship. We look forward to identifying even more opportunities as we continue to work with them in the future.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Keap
Keap provides the technology and services that help small businesses succeed. Keap delivers an all-in-one CRM, sales, and marketing automation solution to help its customers win more business.