Google Ads for B2B: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Launching a Google Ads campaign for your B2B business is a great way to increase customers, sales or leads online. Many B2B businesses use Google Ads as their primary marketing channel because of the affordability, scalability, effectiveness, and measurability on this platform.

It provides you with a wide range of tools to get started. And the tools you use depend on your goals and the nature of your products and services.

To get started, all you need is your email address and website address. And you can head over to ads.google.com to create your account and then follow the steps below to setup your B2B campaign.

 

Campaign objective

Whether you are looking to get leads, sales or raise awareness for your products or services, your campaign options can help. If you are a B2B service business, then “Leads” is likely the best option for you and you can select that and then follow the steps to setup additional features.

You can also choose to setup your B2B campaign without a goal, and then pick the features that you need. But an objective can help you achieve a specific outcome more effectively.

 

Campaign type

Next, you’ll choose the campaign type to promote your products or services. For a “Leads” objective the best campaign type to use is a Search campaign to target your B2B audience.

This campaign type helps you to target people that are searching on Google for your B2B products or services. So, you will add keywords and create targeted ads to reach your audiences to get the leads you need.

There are other types like Display that you can test, but Search is the best option because you’re targeting people that are actively searching, and so that makes them more qualified. They are usually at the latter stages of the buying funnel.

 

Budget

Start with a test budget to test your ads and keywords and see what returns you get. The budget you set depends on a number of factors and doing some keyword research will help you to see how competitive your B2B sector is. The good thing is B2B businesses don’t often need big budgets to get started unlike ecommerce consumer businesses and a budget of at least $700 or £500 is a good place to start.

 

Bidding

One of the best bidding strategies for a Google Ads campaign for B2B industries is Maximise Clicks. This strategy helps you to get as many clicks as possible for your budget.

Maximise Clicks is an automated bid strategy. It sets your bids automatically using Google’s machine learning capabilities and historic keyword data performance insights.

Later when you have a lot more data, you can switch to a Smart bidding strategy that focuses on conversions. There are four of these available in your campaign settings and a good one to switch to is Maximise Conversions with a target cost per acquisition (tCPA).

 

Keywords

When targeting a B2B audience, keyword research is very important to find the right keywords to bid on and also negative keywords to block irrelevant searches. And it’s important that the keywords you use are not those that end users or consumers would use in their searches.

You also need to make sure you are not targeting broad searches that are generic and not as targeted. So, you should use the correct match types for your keywords. There are at this time four match types you can use, phrase, exact, broad and negative match types.

Match types control the searches that trigger your ads. Negative match type is the most restrictive because it blocks any searches that you don’t want triggering your ads and you should add these at the beginning and as you continue to manage your campaign.

Phrase and exact match are good to start with because they trigger searches that are closely related to the keywords in both words and intent.

For example, a B2B service that provides ‘Finance Director Outsourcing’ services can have keywords like:

“FD outsourcing” – phrase match keyword
[finance director outsourcing] – exact match keyword

And then add different variations of these and similar keywords in phrase and exact match type. Later, you can add broad match type keywords when you have a comprehensive negative keyword list and want to target other search queries and increase traffic volumes.

 

Text ads

Google Ads advertising for B2B businesses requires setting up ads that will encourage the right people from clicking and discourage those that are not relevant. So, good copywriting skills are a must and you should focus on the actual searches that are triggering your ads.

There are different ad types you can create in your campaign including responsive ads, call-only ads and dynamic search ads. All these serve different purposes but the most relevant is the responsive search ads.

This ad format gives you up to 15 headlines and four description lines to include all the benefits and features that relate to your products or services. The Google Ads system then creates your ads from these and displays the most relevant at auction-time based on the context and its machine learning algorithm.

 

 

Locations

There are multiple location types you can target in Google Ads including country, county, city, town, postcode, territory and radius. The most relevant to you are primarily those where your potential clients are based. And you can also target those who are outside of your targeted locations but are looking for B2B products and services in your targeted locations, though they may be based elsewhere.

 

Ad schedule

A Google Ads campaign for a B2B business is best suited to running ads during working days and hours. This helps you target people that are looking for your products or services and not just general searchers.

And this helps you to focus your budget to those specific times and maximises your conversions.

However, people and businesses are now searching at all times including those looking for a B2B solution. And they are searching on all device types including desktop, tablet and mobile as they are on the go.

Also, people who search during the weekend and evenings tend to be decision makers and they are the primary audiences you should target.

 

Where your ads appear

For a B2B Search campaign, your ads appear on Google and its partner websites if you’ve opted into their networks. The networks include the Search partner network and Display network, which help you get more impressions and clicks.

The position of your ads on the page is important too. Ads in the top positions, which includes a maximum of four ad positions, reach more searchers and get higher click volumes and click through rates.

Your ads can also appear in lower positions below the natural organic search results. Click through rates are lower there and mean you will get lower click volumes and conversions than higher ad positions.

 

Case Study

Retail Response is a B2B business that provides IT solutions to a wide range of retail clients. They contacted me to help improve their Google Ads advertising. We setup a new campaign which helped to increase conversion rates by 400%. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

Use the form below to contact me about setting and managing a Google Ads campaign for your B2B business.