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9 Tips To Help Your B2B Google Ads Campaigns Shine

It’s no surprise that when searching for products and services, B2B customers – like the rest of the world – find them online.

In fact, 87% From B2B organizations turning to search engines for fresh content.

If your target audience is the average B2B buyer, you need to appear prominently on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs).

While SEO can certainly get you first page visibility, Google Ads is a great way to increase your organic presence – especially in the super competitive results.

Challenges in B2B Advertising

There are many hurdles that marketers face when setting up and optimizing B2B Ads campaigns on Google.

First of all, B2B keywords are expensive thanks to the amount of competition.

In addition, niche markets (usually B2B) often have low search volumes for many of their keywords.

Double that with low conversion data, it means Google’s algorithms may not have enough data to “learn” from it.

Furthermore, since most B2B products and services have a long sales cycle, it can be difficult to attribute the true impact of Google Ads to your bottom line.

9 tips to improve the performance of your Google Ads B2B 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 appear in front of the right audience and generate the desired results.

1. Find Goldilocks words

search for keywords “moderate”; That is, those that are not very expensive, but still have sufficient search volume.

Here’s how:

  • Find general keyword topics, but not too broad, to generate more traffic. Use the Keyword Planner tool for keyword planning. Search for words with a reasonable average monthly search, then check how competitive they are and offer bids in the low and high range. You may have the perfect keyword but if it is too expensive, you will blow your budget out of the water and hinder the sustainability of your campaign.
  • Keep the keyword intent in mind when choosing your keywords. Google respects intent, so be sure to eliminate ambiguity and focus on who might be using those keywords in their search.
  • Create a few keyword lists. While some suggested keyword lists should contain 20-30 keywords per ad group, this can spend your daily budget too quickly and unnecessarily if your keywords are well-targeted. In fact, five well-chosen keywords per listing is quite a bit.

2. Check out the competition

It’s always a good idea to do a competitor analysis to determine which search terms your competitors are investing in.

This way, you will better understand your competitors and alternatives and capture their search terms with targeted bids.

3. Know when it’s OK to be negative

Negative keywords are important for optimizing Google Ads for B2B campaigns.

Why? They prevent your ad from being viewed (and clicked on) by people outside your target audience.

They also ensure that your ad appears only for your position in the industry.

For example, if you offer health insurance, your negative keywords may be other insurance products that may waste your click budget, such as business insurance, life insurance, auto insurance, and so on.

There is also a list of commonly used negative keywords that help B2B marketers steer clear of unqualified clicks from job seekers, investors, and information seekers.

These include terms like jobs, employment, employment, intern, freelancer, resumes, salary, definition, example, what is, training, chart, associations, research and much more.

4. Test and test again

As with all things digital marketing, testing is par for the course for getting the best out of your campaigns. Testing between combining and segmenting campaigns will give the Google algorithm more data to learn from.

See How to Set Up Profitable A/B Tests for PPC Success to learn more.

5. Diversify your media, personalize your audience

Take advantage of custom intent audiences based on websites and search terms in Google Display, Discover, and YouTube.

This allows your ads to reach a customized group of users searching for keywords relevant to you and gives your campaigns an opportunity to run on potentially cheaper media.

6. Try Catch And Release Remarketing

Another strategy for publishing involves using a limited number of expensive keywords to drive quality traffic to your website.

Then, put them on customized remarketing trips on more affordable media (such as the Google Display Network, remarketing campaigns) in an effort to convert them down the line.

7. Truly personalize your landing pages

After putting in so much effort to fine-tune your Google Ads campaigns, it would be quite a shame to lose your hard-earned clicks and leads due to a poorly designed landing page.

Invest in a specialized landing page that matches a user’s search query, has a compelling and impactful offer, and has only one call to action.

If you have multiple campaigns for multiple products or services, each should have its own unique landing page. In other words, don’t send your clicks to your homepage!

8. Let lead quality be your guide

Once you’ve set up your campaign with your carefully chosen keywords and your leads start arriving, it’s important to check the quality of your leads for each keyword.

If it’s clear that better quality leads are coming from keyword A rather than keyword B, you can confidently focus your attention, ads, and additional keywords on keyword A topics.

This can help you direct traffic in the right direction.

9. Mine that data

When measuring ROI, it’s important to use data correlation to get a bigger picture of whether or not your campaigns are adding value, rather than just focusing on what Google Ads attributes to the campaigns.

If you notice an overall increase in conversions after a few weeks of running your campaigns, you can attribute this to your Google Ads efforts.

conclusion

I wish I could say that making Google Ads work for B2B customers is a one time activity!

But once you’ve fine-tuned your Google Ads B2B campaigns to a machine that produces results, you’ll need to continue managing your account.

Check your campaigns frequently and use click-through rates, conversion data, CPC and top-performing ads to continually improve your campaigns and budgets.

In doing so, you will be successfully supporting your overall B2B marketing goals.

More resources:

  • B2B Multichannel Lead Generation: 8 Steps to Success
  • 7 B2B Marketing Trends to Adopt for Digital Success
  • Enterprise SEO Guide: Strategies, Tools, and More

Featured image: SFIO CRACHO / Shutterstock

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