Ultimate Guide to Paid Search for B2B Marketing

The Ultimate Guide
to Paid Search for
B2B Marketing

2
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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Keywords
1 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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4
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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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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6
Account
Structure
2
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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.
Account
Campaign 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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Ad Text,
Landing Page
and Extensions
3
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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 name
n A unique selling point
n A call to action
n 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 extensions
4. Call out extensions
5. App extensions
6. 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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Account
Settings
4
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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 settings
Do you have the right language set for
yours ads?
Location targeting
Where do you want to target? Best to
start small and build this up. Think cities,
then countries.
Device targeting
38% 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 schedule
Select 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 strategy
This 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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Budget
Make 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 method
We’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 rotation
For 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 exclusions
Best 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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13
Conversions
5
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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 ups
n Transactional data
n 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 ads
n App downloads
n 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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Setting The
Campaign Live
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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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Reporting and
Optimisation
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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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Barriers to
Overcome
8
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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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21
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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Little Horwood, Milton Keynes
MK17 0NR
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Ultimate Guide to Paid Search for B2B Marketing

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