Tag Archive for: paid search advertising

B2B Marketing: Paid Search Edition

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Effective paid search strategies are difficult to get right. You may have problems with budget, creative content, channel decisions and more. However, one of the biggest problems marketing departments have with the effective search engine advertising is your audience. Paid search is an excellent tool to capture your leads in a fast and efficient way.

An important note on B2B in general is that the sales cycle is generally much longer. It can take up to three to six months or more to see the benefits of your strategy. Be prepared for this and to see PPC return on investment farther down the road than what you would potentially expect for B2C.

At the core of the strategy, a B2B PPC campaign is just like a B2C one. You have campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and so on, just like B2C—but the important note is to keep the market characteristics in mind.

1. Research

For really any B2B PPC situation, you’ll have to dig in and conduct some serious research to run a top-notch B2B campaign. Why, you may ask? Because even though you might understand your market inside and out, applying it to the PPC channel is a different matter, one that’s full of risk areas in terms of targeting.

The important key takeaway is even though you understand your market, be aware that Google and Bing do not. Their platform will try to match you to as many types of keywords as possible. So stay on top of your search query report and keyword research.

2. Keywords

Keyword research are essentially the same for B2B as they are for B2C. One difference, however, is the preponderance of acronym searches in B2B. Whatever your industry, find out what words the customers are using. For example, an acronym such as “GPR” gets four times the search volume of “ground penetrating radar.” It’s all about understanding the search behavior of your potential customers.

When it comes to bidding and CPCs, they can be all over the board, just as in B2C. Without a doubt, though, there’s more room for “loose” bidding when you’re talking about high-dollar items and services. In other words, B2B typically has higher profit margins, so small increases in CPC isn’t really as big of a deal.

3. Tracking & attribution

If you have any experience with B2B, you know that tracking and lead attribution is a very challenging task. Different from an e-commerce B2C strategy, a lead generation strategy will need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance. There are many ways you can track your paid search performance, Onimod Global experts prefer to use the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs. If you are unsure of how to set this up, first check out Google’s URL Builder Tool as a solid starting point.

Contact Onimod Global

Looking for an agency to completely transform your B2B strategy and skyrocket your lead generation? Reach out to us here!

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Why Google Ads Plans To Limit Search Terms

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Google has started to alert advertisers that it will soon stop showing search queries that triggered their ads when there is not “significant” data.

What is exactly changing?

On Google’s Search Terms Report support page they state, “Starting September 2020,  the search terms report only includes terms that a significant number of users searched for, even if a term received a click. You may now see fewer terms in your report.” In simpler words, advertisers will have reduced visibility into which search queries trigger their ads, even if they register a click or conversion.

Google’s statement from Search Engine Land. “In order to maintain our standards of privacy and strengthen our protections around user data, we have made changes to our Search Terms Report to only include terms that a significant number of users searched for. We’re continuing to invest in new and efficient ways to share insights that enable advertisers to make critical business decisions,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land Wednesday.

What does this mean for you?

According to Seer Interactive, you will lose roughly 28% of your budget’s visibility for paid search.

Prior to the update

  • For every $100K you spent on Google search, you got search term data for $98,700 of it.
  • For every 100K clicks you got, you saw search term data for 98,300 of those clicks.

After the update

  • For every $100K you spend on Google search, you get search term data for $71,000 of it.
  • For every 100K clicks you get, you see search term data for 77,900 of those clicks.

That’s ~$27,000 worth of search term data unseen for every $100K you spend.

Why we advertisers care.

The purpose is to prevent advertisers from having the ability to use minimal query data to identify users or have access to any personally identifiable information users may include in their search queries. Protecting user privacy is important and should be prioritized. However, Google limited query data in Search Console for this reason before the update. The difference is that advertisers pay whenever a user clicks on an ad triggered by a users’ query. Losing this data will have severe financial impact on advertising budgets.

In addition to financial implications, there will also be an effect on the optimization of campaigns and negative keyword lists. Not having any access to this data means that advertisers won’t be able to determine if those queries should be added to negative keyword lists to make their campaigns more efficient.

Contact Onimod Global

For more on this news and other Google Ads late information, follow Onimod Global! Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.