PPC for B2B Business: 7 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

PPC advertising is one of the best ways for your B2B business to promote its products or services to your target audience. It includes many tools and features to research the potential of your market and to manage your campaigns to achieve your goals.

 

If you’re already running some PPC campaigns in Google Ads, then you should consider the management steps you take each week and month. There are some actions you’ll take regularly to ensure that your campaigns are achieving your goals.

 

So, I’ve included here seven proven tips to help you manage your campaigns based on my years of experience as a Google Ads specialist. And if you have any questions about this please contact me at the end of this post.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

 

One of the first PPC tactics to carry out for your B2B business is to setup conversion tracking. This helps you to track all leads and enquiries for your services or sales for products that you are promoting on your B2B website. And you can setup this tracking in your Google Ads account on your Conversions page in Tools & Settings.

 

 

As the screenshot above shows, you can track calls and this is when businesses contact from your ads or landing pages. You can also track calls on your website and add tracking code to your website for this. And you can track both sales and leads on your website and upload the correct tracking code.

 

Another option is to setup goals in Google Analytics and import these into Google Ads for your conversion tracking. You will setup the goals in your Analytics account on the Admin page and follow the instructions on the Goals page.

 

 

2. Add negative keywords

 

Adding negative keywords will help you to block searches that are not relevant and will just waste your budget. You can find these searches in your search terms report under the Keywords tab in your campaign. And then select all the irrelevant ones and add them to a negative keyword list.

 

 

 

3. Check Recommendations

 

The Recommendations page shows you up to 50 recommendation types to help improve your campaigns. These recommendations cover areas such as bid strategy, budgets, keywords, dynamic search ads, sitelink descriptions and many more. However not all will appear and you’ll only see those that are relevant for your campaigns.

 

 

You should apply any recommendations that are relevant for your business and dismiss any that are not. Updating them this way will improve your Optimisation score and bring it closer to 100%.

 

4. Find new keywords

 

To have an effective PPC campaign for your B2B business, you should continue to look for keywords that are related to your products or services. Adding new keywords will help you to increase clicks and impressions and likely lead to more conversions.

 

There are a number of ways to find new keywords. One of the most effective is using the Keyword Planner tool to carry out keyword research. You’ll find this tool in your Google Ads account in the Tools & Settings section.

 

 

Another place to find keyword opportunities is in your search terms report. And any searches that are relevant but have not been added before as keywords, you should select and then click the link at the top to add them as keywords.

 

5. Update bid strategy

 

You’re likely to see a recommendation to change to a new bid strategy on the Recommendations page if you’ve been running your campaigns for some weeks or months. This is also likely be a recommendation to change to a Smart bidding strategy like Maximise Conversions.

 

Also, you can check out other bid strategies to see if they will help you to achieve your campaign goals. There are automated and manual bidding strategies to choose from and they each serve a different purpose.

 

 

You can check each bid strategy in campaign settings to see what purpose it serves. For example, if you want to increase impressions, the Target Impression Share bid strategy is what you’ll need. Or if you want to use manual bidding to have more control, then Manual CPC is the bid strategy to use.

 

 

6. Consider broad match type keywords

 

PPC marketing for B2B companies should be focused on driving the right searches that will help to improve conversion rates. So, it’s important to use the right match types because that determines the type of searches you’ll get. And the best way to get started is by using phrase and exact match keywords only.

 

But after a while you may want to increase click volumes and also target other searches that these match types aren’t able to reach. So, adding broad match type keywords will help to solve this.

 

But, you should be careful with broad match keywords because they are likely to send many searches that are not relevant. So, make sure you have built a good negative keyword list.

 

7. Check Quality Scores

 

Work on your keyword quality scores to improve the overall performance of your campaigns. The scores cover a wide area of the performance of your campaigns including the landing page experience, ad relevance and expected click through rate.

 

 

So, to improve your quality scores you’ll need to improve each of these factors to see your campaign improve. And you should try to get them as close to 10/10 as much as possible.

 

Case Study

 

Retail Response is a B2B business that offers IT services solutions to a wide range of clients in the UK. They have over 15 years experience in the industry and they have been gaining popularity in the B2B retail sector. However, they needed help setting up a new campaign in Google Ads. I setup a new Google Ads campaign which saw an increase in the conversion rate by 400%. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

 

I’m a PPC consultant for B2B businesses and I help setup and manage Google Ads campaigns to promote your B2B products or services. If you have any questions or would like me to send you a proposal and quote for my services, please contact me below.