How B2B Marketers Can Create Paid Search Campaigns With Confidence
Most purchases begin with a search. We all know that from personal experience. Search is how we find and narrow down our options, and come to a purchasing decision.
The same is true of your customers. According to Forrester, 74% of B2B buyers spend at least half of their online purchasing time researching suppliers and you need to be visible to your potential customers during that time. McKinsey report that the entire early stages of the B2B customer journey has moved online. Most B2B seller interactions have moved to remote or digital, and a large majority of B2B decision makers actually prefer this approach.
Before someone can invest in your services, they need to be aware of you. Without that all important first click, your company can’t engage them in conversation or be part of their consideration process. Investment in top-of-funnel digital experiences such as content marketing and online advertising is essential to B2B and professional services marketing.
With the B2B buyer’s journey increasingly self-led and digital, appearing near the top of the search engine results pages should be high on your list of priorities. However, while most B2B marketers are sold on the merits of driving awareness and educating their audiences with an SEO focused content strategy, the same cannot be said for search engine marketing (SEM). B2B’s smaller audiences and longer sales cycles can make paid search seem less worthwhile.
It’s true that organic search still represents the majority of web traffic. But only 9% of users ever make it beyond the bottom of the first page of results. In fact, 90.63% of content gets no organic search traffic from Google at all.
With paid ads occupying more space at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) than ever before, SEM for B2B clearly merits further investigation. Read on and we’ll explain what you need to consider in order to implement paid strategies for B2B organizations with confidence.
For this article, we’ll be looking specifically at Google and its 86% market share. We’ll also be focusing on search ads, however it is worth bearing in mind that Google offers a range of ad types that are suitable for different purposes (including appearing on the second largest search engine, YouTube). We’ll be covering those in an article soon.
SEM and SEO, not SEM vs SEO
The first thing to note is that SEO and SEM shouldn’t be viewed as an either-or decision or competing strategies. The two working together provide separate and complementary routes to put your offer in front of customers who are actively searching for it. From either of those entry points, you get the opportunity to nurture a relationship using all of the tools (and channels) at your disposal.
High quality, search optimised content should always play a foundational role in your digital marketing strategy, but it takes time to build your rankings this way. When done well, paid search gives you the opportunity to bridge that gap and leapfrog straight to the top of the search results. In addition, as we’ve discussed in a previous article, pay per click (PPC) advertising can provide a boost to your SEO strategy when consideration is given to how it will work as an integral part of it.
How can you target your ads?
While keywords are still a very important factor in this kind of marketing, one of the major benefits of paid search is the ability to target specific audiences to find higher quality traffic. You are able to target either, or a combination of both, depending on what works best for you.
Keywords
Choosing which keywords to target might feel daunting, but think like a marketer and you’ll be OK.
Take a client or customer view.
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about what they would type into a browser to find services like yours. What questions, pain points, opportunities, and problems does your offer solve for customers? Combined with your customer personas, thinking this through will help you to arrive at the questions they might ask Google.
Use keyword research tools.
Cross-check your understanding with keyword research tools to find angles you haven’t already covered.
If you’re using Google Search Console, you already know what search terms people are finding you for. Then there are tools like SEMRush, that can help you to enrich this list further and analyse your competitor’s organic and paid search terms for opportunities.
Consider Google’s suggestions.
When you set up an ad on the Google Ads platform, it makes suggestions for keywords based on the landing page URL you enter.
Given the sophistication of Google’s search algorithm, these suggestions are clearly worth considering. After all, they have spent a huge amount of money developing the technology to understand users’ search behaviours, as well as the intent behind them.
Keyword Matching Behaviour
In September 2021, Google announced they were applying their BERT algorithm to keyword matching on Google Ads. This applies the same technology used to understand context and intent on search to their ad targeting. In theory, this means you should be able to gain more qualified traffic using fewer keywords.
It’s worth understanding a bit about how different keyword matching options work in order to work with Google.
There are three types, which will return results that are tightly, moderately, or loosely matched to your keyword. These are Exact Match, Phrase Match, and Broad Match.
Exact Match: Perhaps contrary to expectations, ads with this matching behaviour will show for searches including keywords that have the same meaning or intent as your keyword, not just the exact word or phrase. That said, this option still gives you the most control over who sees your ad.
Phrase Match: Phrase match is more flexible than Exact match. Ads using this type of match will display for searches using terms that encompass the meaning of your keyword. You will reach a broader audience, while still targeting users who are more likely to be searching for your product or service.
Broad Match: This is Google’s loosest match type, and default if you don’t specify another. It will help to deliver more traffic to your website, however you get less control over the terms you appear for. However, as we’ve noted, Google is highly skilled at understanding a user’s search requirements. It will take other factors into account, such as the user’s recent search activities, landing page content, and other keywords in the group, to guide who gets to see your ad.
Online advertising platforms are learning platforms. Our advice would be not to hamper Google’s ability to optimise by overly narrowing the field on which it can play. What people find your business for can actually be quite unpredictable, and Google is capable of matching meaning incredibly well. Give it plenty of room to manoeuvre and learn what is driving traffic for you.
To begin, start with a fairly short list - perhaps around 8 to 12 keywords - and then refine your approach as you get more evidence from your campaigns. As your campaign progresses, you can narrow your campaigns based on the actual results of interactions between Google and people out in the real world.
Edit your existing terms or add new ones to make them more precise. You might want to skew your keywords towards high intent but, as we’ll soon see, Google enables you to narrow your targeting by market segment and buying signals.
If you find that you’re spending money on search terms that are running wide of the mark, this is where ‘negative keywords’ are your friend. You can use these to exclude your ads from showing on searches with that term and prevent irrelevant traffic.
However, It’s more than just keywords...
Keywords are important to search, but Google allows you to be even more selective about who you show your ads to using audience segment targeting. This allows you to focus your communications on people who are most likely to be looking for services like yours, or who have other valuable and relevant attributes.
Segmentation on search ads allows you to reach groups of people based on their demographics, interests and recent research activities.
Of particular interest to B2B marketers is the ability to target in-market segments, based on what Google knows about their recent purchase intent.
You can also use your own target lists to reach Google’s users based on how they have interacted with your business. This enables you to retarget recent visitors to your website so you can stay top of mind. You can also build lookalike audiences to reach new audiences of users who have similar interests to those of existing customers and website visitors.
What goes into your ads?
When creating search ads, you provide Google with a set of headlines and descriptions. Google mixes and matches these in different combinations to find the ones that work best.
If you have concerns about your ability to run A-B testing yourself, this should reassure you. Google’s ad platform will effectively be running multivariate tests for you all the time your ad campaigns are active.
The challenge for you is a creative one. You need to create ad copy that is flexible enough to be mixed and matched while still being engaging and conveying meaning. The headlines and descriptions you feed into Google are limited in length and, because they are combined randomly by the platform to find the most effective solutions, you need to come up with a set that will work well together when different elements are pushed together without duplicating messages.
Organising Your Campaigns and Allocating Budget
Campaign and Budget Structure
Your ads are organised into AdGroups, which are set to target specific customer attributes, keywords, headlines and descriptions. These AdGroups are then organised into Campaigns where you can set daily budgets.
A smart approach is to set an overall budget SEM, and then allocate that across a number of campaigns.
If, for example, you’re an accountancy practice that offers payroll, tax returns, vat returns and general book-keeping, it might make sense to have each of these distinct offers in their own campaign.
However, because Google combines phrases and optimises based on what works well, you can test ad groups against each other. You might want to test different approaches to promoting your VAT offer using different keywords and creative. In that case, you can create separate AdGroups as part of your VAT campaign. Setting the budget at the campaign level essentially allows those VAT promotions to compete with each other so you can find out which is able to spend the budget most effectively.
Cost Per Click
Pay-per-click advertising allows you to limit the amount you’re willing to spend per click for each campaign. This can vary from a few pence to several hundred pounds depending on the value of the keywords you’re targeting. So, if you don’t want to blow all your budget on one golden click on one very expensive keyword, setting some limits can be sensible to ensure you get more engagement.
Don’t Undercook It
If you’re going to dip your toe in the water, be prepared to spend some money and don’t expect immediate results in the first week. Be realistic about your budgets and commit to a process of learning. If you set tiny budgets or don’t give yourself enough time, you’re going to be wasting your money because you’re not giving Google room to manouevre in order to optimise for results.
You can start a Google Ads campaign for under £10 per day, and many people do. However, that is often a sure fire way to waste £10 as it doesn’t give Google enough to go on. Most of our clients who use Google Ads spend several thousand pounds per month.
Setting your budget will depend on a number of factors, such as your overall marketing strategy and objectives, what your competitors are spending and the value of the keywords you’re bidding on.
Think about the number of clicks you would have to receive to get a new customer. From there, use your click through rate to work out how many ad impressions you’ll need to show to get that number of clicks. Finally, consider the value of each sale, and use these to guide your budgeting.
Google Ads has tools built in that will help you to estimate results and take control of your advertising spend. You can also pause and adjust your campaigns at any time.
Tracking Results by Measuring Conversions
Google will track impressions (how many times your ad has appeared) and clicks. It can also track conversions, and this is vital to ensuring you are getting value for money for your campaigns.
Clicks are one thing, but you need to be tracking how this translates to people taking meaningful actions on your website. Is your ad spend resulting in an increase in meeting bookings? Are people arriving on your landing page and signing up for your webinar or downloading your white paper? If your conversion tracking is correlated with making a sale, you can be even more sure that your campaign is working and that it's worth the investment.
Learn, Learn, Learn
If there’s one thing we’d like you to take away from this article it is that Google is not only more than capable of handling a lot of the testing involved in optimising your search engine marketing, it is better placed to.
Your role is to work with the machine and provide the human, creative part of the equation. You’ll need to check in regularly, adjust targeting and budget allocation. But if you’re open to being informed by the analytics and insights that Google provides, you’ll be able to fine-tune your search engine marketing campaigns towards higher value outcomes.
If you’d like to find out more about how online advertising and marketing automation can work together to create a digital first customer experience for your business, book in for a free demo.
B2B marketers must shift their focus from internal agendas to external realities. Embracing an Outside → In approach is the key to staying competitive and relevant.