The majority of B2B customers find products and services online when searching for products and services. As a matter of fact, 87% of B2B companies use search engines to find new content.
Your website should appear prominently on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs) if your target audience is typically B2B buyers. Even though SEO is a great way to get in front of your target audience on the first page, Google Ads can be a valuable tool for you to supplement your organic presence, especially in highly competitive markets.
B2B Advertising Challenges
In order to set up and optimize B2B Google Ads campaigns, marketers must overcome a number of obstacles. Due to the high level of competition, B2B keywords tend to be expensive.
Furthermore, niche markets (usually B2B) have low search volumes for many of their primary keywords. When you combine that with a low conversion rate, Google’s algorithms may not have sufficient data from which to be able to “learn”.
Additionally, due to the long sales cycle associated with most B2B products and services, it can be difficult to measure the true impact of Google Ads on the bottom line.
Google AdWords Tips For Better Performance
This list of tips will assist your Google Ads campaigns in getting in front of the right audience and helping you attain your desired results, regardless of whether you are looking to increase traffic to your website, build brand awareness, increase leads, or launch a new product.
1. Be aware of when it’s okay to be negative
Optimizing your Google Adwords for B2B campaigns requires the use of negative keywords. Why? By doing so, you prevent your ad from being displayed (and clicked on) by individuals outside your target audience. In addition, your ad will only be displayed for your niche in the industry.
In the case of health insurance, you might consider negative keywords that are related to other insurance products that would waste your click budgets, such as business insurance, life insurance, and auto insurance.
Additionally, there is a list of commonly used negative keywords that help B2B marketers avoid unqualified clicks from job seekers, investors, and information seekers. Among them are terms such as jobs, employment, recruiting, interns, free, resumes, salaries, definitions, examples, what is, training, diagrams, associations, and research.
2. Make your audience unique by diversifying your media
Utilize Google Display, Discover, and YouTube custom intent audiences based on websites and search terms. As a result, your ads will reach a specialized audience searching for the keywords relevant to you, and your campaigns will be able to run on more cost-effective platforms.
3. Find Goldilocks keywords
Finding the “Goldilocks” keywords, that is, those that are neither too expensive nor too low in search volume. How to do it:
- Make a few keyword lists. While some suggest that keyword lists should contain 20-30 keywords per ad group, this could result in your daily budget being spent more quickly than necessary if your keywords are well-targeted. The number of keywords per list should be no more than five well-chosen terms.
- Identify broad keyword themes, but not too broad, in order to generate more traffic. Map out keywords using a keyword planner tool. Identify words with a reasonable average monthly search, and then determine how competitive they are, as well as the low and high bid ranges. Even though you may have the perfect keyword, if it is too expensive, it will blow your budget out of the water and compromise the sustainability of your campaign.
- It is important to consider keyword intent when selecting keywords. Since Google honors intent, you should rule out ambiguity and focus on the users who may be searching for these terms.
4. Continually test
To achieve the best results from your digital marketing campaigns, testing is a necessary component. Google’s algorithm will be able to learn more from testing whether to combine campaigns versus segment them.
5. Take a look at the competition
It is always advisable to perform a competitor analysis in order to determine what search terms your competitors are investing in. By doing so, you will be able to better understand your competitors and competitors’ alternatives, and you will be able to capture their search terms through targeted bidding.
6. Use that data to your advantage
Data correlation is key to determining whether your campaigns are adding value or not, rather than just relying on what Google Ads attributes to them. After running your campaigns for a few weeks, you may notice an overall increase in conversions.
7. Make use of catch-and-release remarketing
The use of a limited number of expensive keywords may also be a useful strategy to drive high-quality traffic to your website. In the following phases, ensure that they are placed in tailored remarketing journeys on more affordable mediums (e.g., Google Display, remarketing campaigns) with the intention of converting them as time goes on.
8. Be guided by lead quality
Following the setup of your campaign with carefully selected keywords, it is important to check on the quality of your leads per keyword. When it becomes evident that keyword A generates better quality leads than keyword B, you may be able to confidently focus your attention, ads, and additional keywords on keyword A themes. In this way, you can direct traffic in the right direction.
9. Customize your landing pages to the max
As you have gone to great lengths to fine-tune your Google Ads campaigns, it would be a shame to lose hard-earned clicks and potential leads due to poorly designed landing pages. It is recommended that you invest in a specialized landing page that matches the user’s search query, has a compelling, emotive offer, and only contains one call-to-action.
A unique landing page should be created for each campaign if you are running multiple campaigns for different products or services. Therefore, do not direct your visitors to your home page.
Conclusion
We wish we could say that getting Google Ads to work for B2B leads is an easy process! It is important to continue managing your Google Ads account once you have fine-tuned your B2B Google Ads campaigns into a results-producing machine.
Check your campaigns frequently and utilize click-through rates, conversion data, cost per click, and best-performing ads to optimize your campaigns and budgets continuously. As a result, you will be able to successfully support your overarching B2B marketing objectives.
