The Struggles of B2B PPC Marketing

A common theme in my last few articles is how to address changes made to the Google Ads platform. Previous best practices are no longer relevant, control is being taken away from marketers, and the landscape now is completely different from when many of us started doing PPC and search engine marketing.

The struggle is real for B2B marketers

Some of these changes may be helpful for marketers in Ecommerce or B2C industries, but that’s not always the case for B2B. Below are some of the common struggles facing business-to-business marketers, how we can make the most of it, and potential changes we’d like to see.

Search Term Overlap

One of the main questions asked by B2B clients, whether it’s in the project kickoff call or a regular weekly status call, is something along the lines of “how do we make sure we’re reaching the “right” audience?”

While this isn’t a new problem, overlapping search terms from consumers can kill your B2B budgets. Not only is the search volume higher, but there is likely more competition, and therefore the cost per click will be higher as well.

One workaround for this is to narrow the focus of your keywords. There are two main ways to do this, which you can also combine for even more protection against consumer overlap:

1. Use phrase and exact match keywords
   • Phrase and exact keywords allow advertisers to have more control over matching, which is crucial for the B2B space. Google continues to push broad match (hard), claiming that their intent-matching and machine learning has improved. However, actual Search Terms Reports beg to differ and I’m not fully convinced yet.
2. Include industry-specific language, jargon, and/or modifiers
   • By pairing modifier terms like commercial, industrial, wholesale, supplier, etc. with your core keyword, you’re able to continue targeting a highly relevant term with less potential for overlap with consumers.
   • You can also sync with your (or your client’s) sales team to identify common terminology, pain points, and use cases that they hear when speaking with leads and customers. This is extremely valuable not just for targeting, but also when you’re developing ad copy, creative, and other content.
   • For example: targeting “commercial roofing materials” or “industrial-grade roofing suppliers” if you sell roofing products and your core audience is owners of office/retail/warehouse buildings (not homeowners looking to make repairs).

It’s also important to note that these tactics can result in lower search volume and impressions. However, because the average person probably isn’t using that language, the traffic and leads you generate should be much higher quality.

Major Platform Changes

I would argue that most of Google Ads’ changes in the past 18 months have been to the detriment of B2B advertisers.

Even during the Google Marketing Live event in May, every example given for “why smart bidding is great” and “why you should turn every keyword into broad match” was for Ecommerce and B2C businesses.

Automation has its place and, at the very least, advertisers should be more open to testing new bidding strategies and campaign types. But at the same time, Google doesn’t really have our best interests at heart. They are a publicly traded company and have to add to their bottom line, so keep that in mind before blindly following their recommendations.

• Additionally, no matter how many times Google reps say it, automation doesn’t work for everyone. If there are low-volume keywords, those will take a significant amount of time to collect enough data for the algorithm to start working in our favor. This is a huge issue in the B2B space, where keywords can be very niche, and I don’t think Google has done enough to address that.

Another pain point is the lack of features for lead generation. Not only that, but the features we’ve used for years to help control costs and keep traffic relevant are slowly disappearing.

• Search Terms Reports are less helpful now because a significant portion of search queries are hidden, even if they drove a conversion.
• Performance Max campaigns, which are being pushed aggressively, currently don’t allow you to add campaign-level negative keywords or placement exclusions.
  • Note – if you have a good relationship with your Google rep, they may be able to add campaign-level negatives to PMax campaigns for you. It’s still not ideal that advertisers can’t do it themselves.
• Lead form extensions were a nice addition in 2019, but it’s been 3+ years now. It would be great if we could see some new tools specifically made for B2B advertisers, whether it’s a new extension type, integration of LinkedIn audience targeting in Microsoft Advertising, or something else.

Lastly, with all of these updates, expectations have to be reset. Old tactics don’t work like they used to. Automation requires a learning period, which takes time and can cause performance to fluctuate for a few weeks. It’s imperative that clients/stakeholders are aware of these kinds of things in order to have a healthy working relationship.

Social & Display Performance

Search is great for capturing high-intent users, but what about the Display Network and Paid Social?

Display and Social should be in your marketing mix if you have the budget and capacity for a full-funnel strategy. They can be effective in generating awareness and nurturing potential customers, but it’s important to be very intentional with your targeting. Some strategies include:

• Using Google Ads’ Custom Audiences, which allow you to create customized groupings of various terms or websites that are relevant to your business.
  • Ex: creating a Custom Audience based on your top competitors’ brand names and URLs.
• Building out contact/customer lists and website visitor audiences. You can then nurture people with remarketing campaigns or exclude people already familiar with your business (allowing you to reach net-new users).
• Adding placement exclusions to ensure you’re driving higher quality traffic.
  • Ex: excluding mobile app traffic and children’s YouTube channels.

However, the struggle here is that Display and Social are not usually major conversion-drivers. You shouldn’t go into the test expecting the same results as your Search campaigns. Again, make sure you’re aligned on expectations, because user intent is drastically different across various platforms.

• On Search, you reach people as they explicitly look for something they’re interested in.
  • KPIs should include cost per conversion, conversion rate, revenue (or conversion value), return on ad spend, and other conversion-focused metrics.
• On Display and Social, you interrupt people as they look through their timeline/news feed.
  • KPIs should include awareness, efficiency, and engagement metrics like clickthrough rate, cost per 1000 impressions, cost per click, and engagement rate.

Overall, conversion metrics are still important, but should be emphasized less for Display and Social than they are for Search. Recent updates and privacy regulations have also made it more difficult to track success on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. Those types of changes aren’t going away, so marketers need to adapt and show the value of these channels in different ways moving forward.

Summary

It’s hard not to feel like B2B marketers are being left behind with recent changes made by the major ad platforms. This compounds on top of the usual issues we face (like search overlap), but there are still effective strategies we can use to drive results.

Have any other struggles with paid media for B2B? Reach out on Twitter and let’s chat!