Use these tips to get in front of the right audience and achieve your desired results. It comes as no surprise that when sourcing products and services, B2B customers – like the rest of the world – find them online. In fact, 87% of B2B enterprises turn to search engines (and specifically, Google search) for new content. If your target audience is the typical B2B buyer, you need to appear prominently on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs). This is a great marketing strategy that can affect business to business companies greatly. While SEO can certainly get you page one visibility, Google Ads are a great way to augment your organic presence – especially in super competitive results.

Challenges In B2B Advertising

There are several obstacles marketers face when setting up and optimizing B2B Google Ads campaigns. First of all, B2B keywords are expensive thanks to the amount of competition. Additionally, niche markets (usually B2B) often have low search volumes for many of their main keywords. Compound that with low conversion data, and it means Google’s algorithms might not have enough data to ‘learn’ from. Furthermore, due to most B2B products and services having a long sales cycle, attributing the true impact of Google Ads to your bottom line can be difficult.

9 Tips For Better Performing B2B Google Ads Campaigns

Whether you want to drive more traffic to your website, create brand awareness, increase leads, or launch a new product, these tips will help your Google Ads campaigns get in front of the right audience and achieve your desired results.

1. Do better keyword research

You need to find the best keywords; for your B2B Google Ads Campaigns. These are keywords that are not too expensive but still have sufficient search volume. Here’s how:

• Look for broad keyword themes, but not too broad, to generate more traffic. Use a keyword planner tool or keyword research tool to map out keywords.
• In your keyword research, look for words with a reasonable average search volume, then check how competitive they are, and the low and high range bids. You might have the perfect keyword but if it is too expensive, it will blow your budget out of the water and hinder the sustainability of your campaign.
• Consider keyword intent when doing your keyword research. Google honors intent, so be sure to rule out ambiguity and focus on who might be using these keywords in their search.
• Create a few keyword lists. While some suggest keyword lists should contain 20-30 keywords per ad group, this could result in your daily budget being spent too quickly and is unnecessary if your keywords are well-targeted. In fact, five well-chosen keywords per list are just fine. Remember this for future keyword research, too.

 

2. Understand The Competition

It is always good to carry out a competitor analysis to identify what search terms your competition is investing in. This way, you will better understand your competition and alternatives and capture their search terms through your targeted bidding. Google analytics can help you do competitor research.

3. It’s Okay To Be Negative

Negative keywords are important for optimizing your Google Ads for B2B campaigns. Why? They prevent your ad from being shown (and clicked on) by people outside your target audience. They also ensure that your ad is only shown for your niche in the industry. For example, if you provide health insurance, your negative keywords might be other insurance products that would waste your click budget such as business insurance, life insurance, car insurance, etc. There is also a list of commonly used negative keywords that help B2B marketers steer clear of irrelevant searches and unqualified clicks from job seekers, investors, and those simply needing information. A Negative keyword list might include terms such as jobs, employment, recruiting, intern, free, resumes, salary, definition, example, what is, training, diagram, association, research, and many more. These can help you to not waste ad spend on the wrong audience.  You can set these up in your Google ads account.

4. Never Stop Testing

As with all things digital marketing-related, testing is par for the course to get the best out of your campaigns. Testing between combining ad campaigns vs. segmenting them will give Google’s algorithm more data to learn from. See How to Set up Profitable A/B Tests for PPC Success to learn more. Some other elements you can test include using an ad group, changing ad copy, using exact match keywords, using specific keywords in ad copy, testing social proof focused ads, testing pain points related ads, using specific pages as landing pages and trying new keywords that might help your audience find your pages better.

5. Diversify Your Mediums, Customize Your Audiences

Make good use of custom intent audiences based on websites and search terms in Google Display, Discover, and YouTube. This allows your ads to join the search network, where a bespoke group of users searching for the keywords relevant to you and gives your campaigns a chance to run on potentially cheaper mediums. Doing this can really help your lead generation to improve. If you are a B2B company, you may want to include multiple decision makers in your lead generation process.

6. Try Catch And Release Remarketing

Another strategy to deploy in PPC campaigns involves using a limited number of expensive keywords to drive high-quality traffic to your website. After that, place them in tailored remarketing journeys on more affordable mediums (such as Google Display, remarketing campaigns) in a bid to convert them down the line.

7. Really Customize Your Landing Pages

After going through so much effort to fine-tune your Google Ads campaigns, it would be an absolute shame to lose the hard-earned clicks and potential leads due to a poorly designed landing page. Invest in a specialized landing page that matches the user’s search query, has a compelling, emotive offer, and only has one call-to-action. If you have several campaigns for several products or services, each should have its own unique landing page. In other words, don’t send your clicks to your home page! You should also test different landing pages to ensure you are using the best possible version in your campaign.

8. Let Lead Quality Be Your Guide

Once you’ve set up your campaign with your carefully selected keywords and your leads start coming in, it is important to check on the quality of your leads per keyword. If it is clear that better quality leads are coming from keyword A rather than keyword B, then you can confidently focus your attention, ads, and additional keywords on keyword A themes. This can help you generate leads and steer traffic in the right direction.

9. Look at your Data

When measuring ROI, it is important to use data correlation to get the bigger picture of whether your campaigns are adding value or not, rather than just focusing on what Google Ads attributes to the campaigns. Luckily, you are able to use your Google Ads account to get a great insight into your google ads campaign and how it has performed. If you see an overall increase in conversions after a few weeks of running your campaigns, you can attribute this to your efforts on Google ads. You may also look at your click through rates, qualified leads, web content, sales funnel, search results, Google analytics and more to determine whether your ad campaigns have been successful or whether they need more tweaks. Remember to always look at your most relevant Google searches and keep adjusting your keywords accordingly.

Conclusion

I wish I could say that getting Google Ads to work for B2B leads is a one-and-done activity! But once you have fine tuned your B2B Google Ads campaigns into a results-producing machine, you need to continue managing your account. Check on your campaigns frequently and use click-through rates, conversion data, cost per click, and best-performing ads to optimize your campaigns and budgets continually. In doing so, you will successfully support your overarching B2B marketing goals. Originally published by Alex Macura on the Search Engine Journal.