The Ultimate Guide to Paid Search for B2B Marketing

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Most people often call paid search activity PPC, even though PPC can be used across a range of different channels. Pay Per Click (PPC) actually stands for a popular costing model for online advertising where advertisers pay each time a person clicks on the advert.

This guide is for those wanting to know how using a specific B2B strategy for your paid search activity can help enable your Demand Generation to really kick off. Unlike B2C paid search, B2B requires you to think less about the product and more about the person. There are a multitude of tools and techniques that can help ensure that you are talking to the right person at the right time and we plan to share a few of our top tips with you in this guide.

Introduction

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Keywords1

PPC

B2B organisations put an average of 27.8% of marketing budget towards PPC, learn how to make the most of that budget now.

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

1.1 Keyword selection

On average 18% of B2B buyers will find a new company via a paid search ad. This doesn’t happen by luck, but with research to ensure that your ads are targeting the right buyers, at the right time in their journey.

Keyword selection is used to identify the words which can produce the best Return on Investment (ROI) for your paid search account. For B2B organisations this can be more challenging as there isn’t always transactional data to help establish profitability, but good use of conversion tracking will help you measure campaign success.

Identifying and selecting keywords require you to have a keen understanding of where your buyers are on their buying journey. Broader keywords could indicate that the user

doesn’t know what they’re looking for at the moment. Whereas long tail, more specific keywords should indicate that the user knows exactly what they want and that they are looking for a solution.

A mixture of both short and long tail keywords often produce the best results, with good ROI from the long tail keywords, and higher volumes from the short tail keywords.

Best practices: Define the type of buyers that you want to target with your ad, and use long tail keywords to target accurately.

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

1.2 Keyword research

Knowing that you need to select keywords carefully, the best place to start is with well-structured keyword research. This is a step that people too often skim over; ‘We already know the product, we can just use the words from the landing page’, and whilst the last assumption could work these all too common sweeping statements are often plain wrong.

After all you wouldn’t start a recipe without checking you have the ingredients first? It’s the same with a paid search account. Keywords are the base of the mixture, and are the key to its success. Keyword research is ensuring you have the best ingredients possible to achieve this.

A good place to start is in AdWords, using the keyword planner tool. Starting with a handful of product or service related keywords; you can then look at words that people use to search for your product. Within the keyword planner we can start to build up a catalogue of keywords that have high search volumes, and identify which have the potential to be the best for ROI.

For B2B buyers the emphasis here should be utilising the keyword research to work out where the buyers are in their journey, and focus on keywords that aids the buyer in finding a solution to their problem.

Best practices: Use a keyword planning tool to determine your keywords.

Move away from branded keywords and look at shaping keywords around buyer needs.

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Account Structure

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Best practices: Design a structure that allows you to be able to grow and develop the account in the future.

Use a structure that follows your website structure.

Once themes from your keyword research are identified you can start to populate the account structure. When creating the structure think about how you might want to expand this in the future. Will you want:

n More themes?

n More targeting?

n More languages?

All of these should be taken into account so that you are able to set up the naming conventions as you would like to carry on and build the account. Doing this right first time will stop you from having to redo work and save you time in the long run.

Who will be expecting reports from you? Can you report at the level that you want for the people that you need to?

Account – This is the name of the brand or division.Campaign – Follow the structure of the website, but this is generally the top level version of your product or service.Ad group – These are themes within your campaign, and they should link very closely to your keywords, ad text and landing pages.

AccountCampaign Campaign

Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group

Ad Ad Ad Ad

Keyword Keyword Keyword Keyword

Keyword Keyword Keyword Keyword

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Ad Text, Landing Page and Extensions

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Once you have a good list of keywords, which are based around what the user searches for, you can start looking to build up compelling, relevant ad text. As best practice ad text should include:

n Brand namen A unique selling pointn A call to actionn The keyword (where possible)

Ensuring that you have all of these aspects of an ad, means that it is more likely to resonate with a user, and that you are more likely to see more clicks and conversions, as the user is able to see that you offer what they are looking for. If you can provide an answer to their problem, in one or two clicks, then the user is much more likely to convert.

Ad extensions can create a 6–20% increase in ad CTRs. So when writing ads and creating account structure, take time to ensure that you have at least one of the six types of ad extensions on your account.

1. Sitelink extensions 2. Call extensions 3. Location extensions4. Call out extensions5. App extensions6. Review extensions

If you do one thing to improve the performance of your campaign or account, make sure that it is using a dedicated PPC landing page. Using a landing page optimised for your campaign will help bring up the quality score, lower CPCs and increase on-page conversions.

Best practices: Create compelling ad text that includes your brand name, a USP, call to action and the targeted keyword.

Use ad extensions with your campaign.

Use dedicated PPC landing pages.

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Account Settings

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Account and campaign settings are where you are able to edit and select targeting options for paid search. Alongside well researched keywords, you’ll want to ensure that you’re targeting the correct country, at the right time. So when setting up your campaign, you’ll need to check and change the following:

Language settingsDo you have the right language set for yours ads?

Location targetingWhere do you want to target? Best to start small and build this up. Think cities, then countries.

Device targeting38% of all paid search clicks come from a mobile device. Use analytics to determine the mobile breakdown of your traffic, and think about applying bid adjustments if your mobile traffic is particularly high or low. If your website is not mobile optimised or responsive, we’d recommend to put a 100% bid adjustment on mobile as it is unlikely that your traffic is going to convert at the same rate as desktop traffic.

Ad scheduleSelect when you want your ads to show. When is the peak time for your audience to visit your website? Think about making bid adjustments for your peak traffic times, ensuring you’re top of the page.

Bid strategyThis will depend on what type of campaign you’re running. As a rule of thumb if you’re looking for conversions, go for ‘Focus on clicks’. From here, you’d manually optimise for conversions. If you’re going for brand awareness use ‘Focus on impressions’ and we’d suggest only using ‘Focus on conversions’ once your account is well established with a significant amount of converting traffic.

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

BudgetMake sure you set a budget; this is automatically set to £0, so you want to make sure this is changed before the campaign goes live.

Delivery methodWe’d recommend using an accelerated bid strategy; this means that you should be eligible to show ads as often as possible. If a buyer is searching, you want to make sure that your ad is showing.

Ad rotationFor a new campaign, we’d recommend setting this to rotate evenly. This will mean that your new ads will have the opportunity to rotate evenly before they are optimised.

IP exclusionsBest practice is to add an internal IP exclusion to your AdWords account, this should limit how much budget is wasted on internal traffic.

Best practices: Ensure that your settings are sorted before the campaign goes live.

Set your ads up so that they have the best opportunity to show, and optimise as you gather more data.

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Conversions5

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

What counts as a conversion and how do you track them? You can set conversions as any one of the following in AdWords:

n Form fills/sign upsn Transactional datan Click to Call (users who see

an ad on mobile may be given the opportunity to call straight from the ad. This is known as ‘Click to Call’)

n Calls from desktop/tablet adsn App downloadsn In app downloads

It is best practice to have at least one conversion value that you are going to be measuring success on set-up before the campaign goes live.

A Google study revealed that 70% of all searches have used a Click to Call button to get in touch with a business immediately.

As a rule of thumb most B2B campaigns won’t have transactional conversions, unlike B2C accounts. This is where you need to set conversions up as form submissions and downloads. Especially if this is integrated with a marketing technology platform, as you should be able to set-up an inbound segment enabling you to not only see which keywords have converted, but also how they are interacting with the rest of your campaign.

Best practices: Identify what conversions you want to track.

Set you conversion up in AdWords before the campaign goes live.

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Setting The Campaign Live

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

When setting a campaign live, you’ll want to ensure that you have done all that you can to make sure that it starts without a hitch. The top best practice here is to remember achieve profitability first, and then grow the account.

This doesn’t mean that you can only start with a small account; but it does mean that you need to take your time when you set the account live. Start with one campaign or a couple of ad groups. Monitor their launch; what are the quality scores? CTRs? Impression share? Conversion rate? Use the first few days to optimise the campaign so that it ‘starts off on the right foot’.

A good metric to check is Impression Share; this will show the percentage of time that your ads have been shown. For example if 10 people search ‘demand generation’ and your ad shows 8/10 times, you’ll have an IS of 80%. Looking at IS (lost due to budget) and IS (lost due to rank), will help you work out if your ads aren’t showing all of the time and why they’re not.

Best practices: Test your conversion tracking code.

Set one ad group live at a time.

Take the time to optimise as you go along; check back every four hours or so to see how the campaign is running.

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Reporting and Optimisation

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Reporting and optimisation go hand in hand; you need one to complete the other. Reports can help you decipher the pages upon pages of data available through AdWords. This is where you need to be selective about what type of data you report on. What data is going to give you the most value by measuring and acting on it? In this case, less is more. Identify the most important metrics that will help you improve your account to reach KPIs.

For example if you’re working towards a Cost Per Conversion/Acquisition target, you can look at optimising towards this target by targeting the keywords with the best ROI.

When setting up conversions it is always best to achieve profitability first and then make changes which help build up the quantity of conversions. Doing this the other way round is always more difficult, and in the end costly.

Best practices: Select conversion and campaign metrics before setting the campaign live.

Achieve profitability and then scale the campaign up.

Create regular internal reports for optimisation and review purposes.

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Barriers to Overcome

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

Setting up a paid search account isn’t always as straightforward as it could be. Complications such as multilingual accounts and multi-currency can cause difficulty amongst other challenges. Finding out what will be required in terms of language, targeting, budgeting and reporting will have an effect on your account structure. Even if you start out with a campaign that is in English targeting the UK; is there the potential to advertise in other languages in the future? If so, now, not later, is the time to think about it.

Before starting an account you’ll need to have an in-house conversation about whether as an enterprise you need the account to be centralised, whether you need it in-house or outsourced. All of these are separate conversations in their own right, but as a starter for this conversation you need to think about:

n Do you need your account to be centralised or is there the flexibility to break this up into separate accounts for different parts of the business?

n Do you want to manage the paid search in-house or outsource?

n Do you have the time and expertise to manage it in-house?

n If you outsource paid search, who is going to manage the agency in house?

n What team would it fall under; web/digital or marketing?

Best practices: Identify barriers and potential challenges for the campaign at the planning stage.

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PPC GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETING

If you’re ready to get going with your paid search account, then our checklist should help you make sure that you have everything that you need. Once you have the rough structure of where you want to be, consider speaking to a paid search expert. Even if this isn’t your first account, it is always worth getting someone with experience to look it over.

n Does your account structure look sensible?

n Does it allow for growth in the future?

n Have you remembered all of the ad extensions?

n How does you keyword targeting look?

n Have you set-up keyword targeting options?

n Is conversion tracking in place and working?

Whilst you can do all of this yourself, it’s invaluable to get someone else to sense check it with you. From here we would recommend using an editing tool to draft and do a final check of the account before going live, such as AdWords Editor.

Once you’re ready to hit the green light, remember to take it slowly. Launch one ad group, test a conversion and slowly turn on all of the ad groups and campaigns over a couple of days or weeks. This will give you time to monitor and optimise as you go along, allowing you to achieve profitability sooner.

What next?9

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About Ledger Bennett DGA

We are a B2B Demand Generation agency that uses sales and marketing know-how to help customers increase revenue by deploying Inbound Marketing, Content Marketing and Marketing Automation strategies. Our highly focused Demand Generation programmes drive our customers’ business performance, helping them to:

n Generate more opportunity

n Convert that opportunity into sales

n Retain customers and grow their value

Using more measurable and cost effective techniques than traditional full service marketing agencies we are able to maximise business revenue in the modern world where the internet has fundamentally changed the behaviour of the buyer.

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Telephone: +44 (0)8458 383883 Email: info@LBDGA.com

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Ledger Bennett DGA Tungsten House, Warren Road Little Horwood, Milton Keynes MK17 0NR

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Ledger Bennett DGA 1st Floor Centric House 390-391 Strand, London WC2R 0LT

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