The Ultimate B2B PPC Guide

As the internet continues to grow in popularity and expand connectivity worldwide, more and more businesses are beginning to utilize pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to find B2B clients, grow their revenues, and make an impact in their respective markets.

As of April 2022, there were over 5 billion internet users globally, or 63.1% of the world’s population. Internet usage will increase even further in the coming years, giving companies leverage and reach as we’ve never seen before.

Most customers and businesses use search engines to research ideal solutions for the problems they’re trying to solve. By getting in front of these prospective customers through paid search engine advertising, you’ll be positioning yourself for success.

In this guide, we’re going to dive deep into B2B PPC advertising and walk you through what this type of marketing entails, the benefits of PPC for business growth, campaign setups, tips for organic management and optimization, PPC metrics, and whether you should run your campaigns on your own or hire an expert agency to do the work for you. Ready to get started? Let’s dive into B2B PPC!

B2B PPC, or business-to-business pay-per-click advertising, is when your business runs ads on search engines or media sites and pays every time a prospective customer clicks on your ad.

For instance, running PPC ads on Google is a very popular solution for finding B2B customers; if your company were to create a series of ads related to your newest product or service and launch them to go live, everyone searching Google for your particular product or service would see your business show up in the search results.

The position in which your ads appear depends on how much you’re willing to pay and bid for a particular ad position. If your company is willing to pay more for each click to your website or product landing page, you’ll be prioritized, and your ads will show above the competition if they’re bidding less.

Paid advertising can generate an excellent ROI (return on investment) for B2B companies, especially when compared to slower and more involved alternative marketing methods such as SEO (search engine optimization) which can take a very long time to ramp up and bring in tangible results.

Since advertising can increase brand awareness by more than 80% and bring you leads and prospects as soon as your ads go live, it is an ideal solution for many business-to-business enterprises looking to rapidly grow their customer or client base. In the next few sections, we’re going to dive into the benefits of using PPC for digital growth and walk through all of the terms and campaign setup steps you need to know in order to get your campaign off the ground as quickly as possible.

There are numerous benefits to leveraging pay-per-click advertising for digital growth, and it can be a great way to boost your business in the short run without taking on significant overhead or a significant amount of excess time.

The goal of any B2B enterprise is to be in front of your future prospects as much as possible for when they’re ready to make a decision, and PPC allows you to do just that efficiently. B2B PPC is only one of the methods you should be using to promote well-rounded business growth, and there are multiple B2B marketing strategies you should be using to grow your company and reap the benefits of a solid marketing campaign.

Believe it or not, PPC can be cost-effective, increase your website traffic rapidly, help you nail down your audience targeting in a specific manner, and increase lead conversion rates. 

Cost-Effective Strategy

B2B PPC can be an effective strategy that doesn’t have to break the bank because you have full control over how much you’re willing to pay per visitor and how much you’re willing to spend on a PPC campaign.

The beauty of pay-per-click advertising is that you can set an advertising budget upon campaign creation and sit back and watch your results while performing slight tweaks and optimizations as required. Some forms of advertising require you to pay a lump sum upfront without knowing how much further investment you’ll need to make in the future. PPC is not so – you can define every single cost upfront to ensure your business stays within your marketing budget and sustainably achieves results. 

Web Traffic Growth

As more and more prospective customers and clients see your company’s ads online, you’ll receive more and more clicks to your website and landing pages.

When PPC ads are running, individuals who are searching for various topics on their favorite search engine will see your company show up in their search results. Once they click on a result that interests them, they’ll be taken to the landing page chosen by the ad and potentially become a lead or make a purchase. 

PPC is one of the most effective online methods for increasing your web traffic and getting your business in front of more prospective customers without having to perform manual outreach, call decision-makers, or use alternative B2B marketing methods. 

Precise Audience Targeting

PPC advertising lets you perform precise audience targeting in order to only show your ads to those most likely to convert. This is great in the B2B world since your goal is to target particular individuals who are decision-makers in your industry.

While setting up your PPC advertising campaign, you’ll be able to choose which interests, behaviors, geographic locations, devices, keywords, or even times of day you want to target and show your ads. If you already know a significant amount about your target audience (through persona brainstorming), all you have to do is plug this information into your advertising campaign, and if all goes well, watch the results roll in! 

Increased Conversion Rates

PPC advertising is not cold outreach or cold marketing. The individuals who click on your search engine marketing ads are already searching for the products or services you offer and are, therefore, much more qualified and likely to take action than a cold prospect.

You can leverage this benefit of PPC advertising to your advantage by writing advertisements that speak to someone who knows they want what you offer but requires a slight push to get them over the edge and choose your business over the competition.

B2B PPC is an excellent way to increase your conversion rates and get more qualified prospects into your business pipeline.

While PPC, or pay-per-click advertising, is the primary point we’ll be discussing in this ultimate guide, there are also additional terms you need to be aware of, such as SEM, SEA, remarketing, and display. 

SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

Search Engine Marketing or SEM simply refers to the process of placing ads on search engines or pursuing organic strategies such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). B2B PPC will very likely be a part of your SEM and digital marketing strategy since the advertising campaigns businesses run tend to perform very well on search engines due to the targeted intent and higher conversion rates present. While SEO is out of the scope of this guide, it is another strategy your company can pursue in order to capture leads and prospects from search engines. 

SEA (Search Engine Advertising)

Search Engine Advertising, or SEA, is closely related to SEM with one key difference, there are no organic strategies, as it is primarily focused on advertising. SEA refers to paid advertising such as CPC (cost per click) or PPC (pay per click); there aren’t any organic methods, such as search engine optimization or content marketing, within SEA. 

Remarketing

Remarketing is when your company shows ads to individuals who have already interacted with your brand or visited your brand’s website or landing pages in the past. Creating remarketing campaigns can help your company market to people who didn’t become a lead on their very first visit but may become a B2B lead if you keep showing them your brand and getting in front of them on a regular basis. As marketers, we know the importance of multiple “touch points” when it comes to acquiring a customer. Remarketing does precisely that, giving your prospects multiple opportunities to interact with your company and increasing their chances of becoming loyal customers or clients. 

Display Advertising

Unlike search engine advertising, where your ads are shown directly on the search engine results pages (SERPs), display advertising shows visual advertisements on different media platforms and websites. You’ve likely seen those leaderboard or banner ads that show up on various content, informational, or brand websites all over the internet; this is what display advertising is referring to. If your company creates a display advertising campaign, you’ll have to define which digital media you’ll be showing, the websites and media you’d like your ads to display on, and the amount you’re willing to pay or bid for each click from your display ads.

By this point, you should be relatively comfortable with what B2B PPC is and how it ties into the process of creating campaigns that bring prospects and clients to your company. In this section, we’ll be taking it a step further and looking at how to set up an ideal PPC campaign that gets results.

We’ll walk through five steps that your business can take to set up a PPC campaign that thrives, including defining your goals, deciding which platforms or media you’ll advertise on, the keywords and topics you choose to bid on, the text and copywriting of your advertisements, and campaign monitoring and optimization. 

1. Define Your Campaign Goals

Before you create a PPC campaign for your B2B company, you’ll first need to define your exact campaign goals.

• Are you trying to reach a particular decision-maker in your target market? 
• What actions do you want them to take? 
• Are you trying to educate them first and then make a sale? 
• Is there a workflow or CRM pipeline that you want your prospects to go through?

Sit down with your team and think through the precise goals you want to achieve from your campaign. If you want your PPC ads to bring in new leads that you’ll nurture and close further down the funnel, your campaign strategy will need to reflect that. If you want to target decision-makers at companies in your market and get them to join one of your entry-level products or services and pitch them an upgrade later, your campaign design will have to take this into account. 

2. Decide Where You’ll Advertise

Even though you have numerous choices as to where you’ll want to advertise your business, it’s smart to go where the majority of your prospects and customers are.

In our current day and age, the majority of people searching for information on search engines use Google. There are alternatives like Bing, social media, and display advertising, but when it comes to search, there’s no question that Google is the main game in town.

PPC refers to pay-per-click advertising, which reaches beyond just search engines. You can create pay-per-click ads on various social media networks or even partner with media websites and offer to pay them for every click on advertisements you place within their content or show to their audience.

The most critical part of this step is knowing where your target audience spends time and ensuring that your advertisements are displayed on those specific platforms. 

3. Choose Keywords and Topics to Bid On

After you’ve defined your campaign goals and decided where you’ll target your ideal audience, you’ll have to choose the keywords and topics you want your campaigns to focus on.

For search engine PPC campaigns, this is a matter of placing keywords to target within your ads upon campaign creation. For more flexible platforms, such as social media, you’ll be able to choose what types of individuals you target or what keywords should be included in the interests of your target audience.

Take some time to define the keywords you’ll target using keyword tools (free options available through a quick search engine search) and make sure they align with what your target audience is looking for.

You must target buyer keywords if you want your leads or prospects to take action sooner rather than later.

As a final tip, we recommend adding negative keywords or topics to your PPC campaigns for topics you do not want your ads showing under. If you have competitor brands or other similar keywords that don’t match your business, include them in your negative keyword list to ensure your ads won’t show when someone types these keywords or phrases into a search query. 

4. Write Your Advertisements

After you’ve defined all the above and know exactly what your campaign will be about, you can begin writing your advertisements and ad copy.

Depending on your team’s skill with copywriting, it may be worth hiring a copywriter specialist to define all of the features and benefits of your products or services and write them in a manner that appeals specifically to your B2B target audience.

If you’re on a budget or familiar with copywriting, you can write an initial set of ads on your own and then optimize them as your campaign runs if the results aren’t up to par right off the bat. 

5. Monitor and Optimize Your Campaign

Once your campaign is created, and all of your advertising copy is written, you cannot just sit back passively and watch your campaign run. If you want your campaign to be successful long-term, you need to always be monitoring your ads and optimizing and tweaking on a regular basis.

For instance, when a campaign is first started, you’ll likely not know all of the negative keywords or terms for which you do not want your ads to be showing up. As your campaign runs, you’ll notice these keywords and can add them to your negative keyword list periodically.

Similarly, if you see a particular ad or advertising block that isn’t getting results compared to others, you can choose to pause that specific ad or rewrite it in order to see how those changes affect ad performance.

B2B PPC advertising is a constant effort of optimization, tweaking, and improvement. You should go into every campaign knowing that you’ll likely have to do additional optimizations as you go along and that nothing will be perfect from the very beginning.

Once your campaign is up and running, don’t fall into the trap of sitting back and letting it “run passively”; the first few days and weeks of your PPC campaign are critical for optimization and management work.

Did you set up your campaign correctly? Is your budget not being spent? If so, what is the reason? Are there negative keywords that your ads are showing up for that they shouldn’t be showing up for?

All of these are questions that you’ll need to answer in the early stages of your campaign, all while taking the time to ensure your campaign is set up properly to deliver results. 

Keep a Close Eye on Your Metrics

There are certain B2B PPC campaign metrics that you or your team need to watch like a hawk, especially when your campaign is brand new and just went live. We’ll dive deeper into each of these metrics in the next section, but for awareness purposes, they are:

• Cost Per Click (CPC)
• Clicks
• Click Through Rate (CTR)
• Conversion Rate
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
• Impression Share
• Quality Score
• Cost Per Conversion or Acquisition (CPA)

If one of these metrics differs significantly from the benchmark numbers you would expect in your industry, it should be a clear warning signal and indication that you need to optimize and fix up your campaign as soon as possible.

These metrics are the best way to measure your PPC campaigns’ health and get your business into the habit of pursuing data-driven approaches to B2B PPC advertising. 

Split-Test Landing Pages, Headlines, Ad Variations, and CTAs

An important part of ongoing campaign management and optimization is split-testing various landing pages, headlines, ad variations, and calls to action (CTAs).

The first ad or headline you come up with isn’t automatically going to be the best for your particular audience, targeting strategy, and market. The only way to continuously optimize and improve your B2B PPC efforts is to perform properly configured split-testing where you have a clear control and a single variable you are testing in each split test.

For instance, if you decided to split-test two different headline variations of your advertisement, you would set up your ads to rotate traffic evenly between both headlines and leave the rest of the ad alone. Your current ad is your “control variable” (unchanged), and your ad with the new headline you are testing is your “variation or test variable.”

After you’ve had enough traffic to each ad variation to rule out the noise, you’ll compare your control against your variation and determine which headline performs better.

Even though this is a simplistic overview of split-testing, and this could be an entire guide on its own, the important takeaway here is that a critical piece of ongoing campaign management is constantly testing new variables to add minor improvements that eventually stack up to massive improvements in sales and your bottom line. 

Continuously Review Your Keywords and Test New Options

The initial keywords you inserted into your B2B PPC campaign aren’t always the keywords you’ll have in one of your best-performing campaigns. The only way to know which keywords work better is to continuously review your keyword or topic options and test new keywords against your existing ones.

We already discussed the importance of split testing in ongoing campaign management, but it’s essential that you also remember to include new keywords as you come up with them.

Over time, as your market changes, there’ll be new products, services, or terms that make their way into the woodwork. As these new terms appear, they automatically become opportunities for new keywords you can test and target. Don’t get hung up on just using the keywords you started with, but be flexible and willing to make these changes as a part of your ongoing optimization efforts.

Your B2B PPC campaign is finally up and running, and you’ve got a basic grasp on ongoing management and optimization, what do you do next?

Once you’re at this point, it’s time to embrace the data-driven approach to campaign management at its core and shift your focus to the critical metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that’ll drive your campaigns to success.

We’re going to go over some of the most important metrics your business will want to watch throughout the life of your PPC campaigns and how you can verify whether or not each of your metrics is on the right track. 

1. Cost Per Click (CPC)

The cost per click or CPC of your campaign is, just as its name suggests, the average amount you’ve paid for every click on your advertisement. This number can be found by dividing your total ad spend by the number of clicks. 

2. Clicks

Clicks are a very simple but important metric that tells you how many people clicked on your PPC ad. The more clicks you’re getting, the more you know your ad is resonating with your audience and getting them to take action. 

3. Click Through Rate (CTR)

The click-through rate or CTR of your PPC ad is a percentage that shows what portion of people who saw your ad actually clicked on it. This is a good measure of how attention-grabbing and tailored to your audience the ad is. The click-through rate is calculated by taking the number of people who clicked on your ad (clicks) by the number of people who saw your ad (impressions) The resulting number is a percentage and can be multiplied by 100 after division to put it into percentage form. 

4. Conversion Rate

Similar to the click-through rate, your PPC conversion rate measures how many people actually performed your target action or “conversion action” from all of the people who interacted with your ad. This number is also a percentage and can be calculated by dividing conversions by ad interactions. 

5. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Return on ad spend, or ROAS, is also a metric that’s already well-described by its name. ROAS tells your business the ratio of dollars earned in revenue vs. dollars spent on advertising. If you have a ROAS of 2.0 on a PPC ad, for example, you know that for every $1.00 spent on advertising, you’ve earned $2.00 in sales or revenue, which is a 2:1 return on your ad spend. 

6. Impression Share

Impression share is typically a function of how much you’re willing to spend and bid on your ads as they show on search engines, digital media, and online in general. If you’re bidding more on your ads, they’ll be shown to more prospects and will be higher up on the page. Similarly, lower bids will show less or show lower on the page, out of direct view of people who browse to the page your ads reside on. Impression share tells you how many times your ad was shown (impressions received) compared to the competition. If your impression share is very low, it means your ad is barely showing, likely because your competitors are bidding significantly higher. 

7. Quality Score

The quality score of your ad is a Google-unique metric that shows you how well your landing page and advertisement relate to the search query. If you have a high-quality score, it means that your ad and the website your prospects/leads land on are very well-tailored to the topic of your ad. Low-quality scores mean poor relevance and impact your ad delivery and cost. 

8. Cost Per Conversion or Acquisition (CPA)

Cost per conversion or cost per acquisition (CPA) is a metric that shows you how much you spend in advertising to acquire a customer or conversion. This metric is calculated by taking the total cost spent on ads and dividing it by the number of conversions.

Most ad campaigns these days, especially on search engines like Google and major social media platforms like Meta/Facebook, use artificial intelligence (AI) to guide ads to the right target audience during delivery and perform optimizations on the fly.

When you first launch an ad, these AI optimizers need some time to see how your ad performs before they can begin making live adjustments; this is called the “learning period.”

Google ads recommend that you should not touch or modify your ads during the learning period, as any adjustments to your ad copy, text, or targeting, will reset the learning period and make it invalid.

The learning period typically takes seven days to adjust for most campaigns and is a period where you may see less than optimal performance while the algorithm determines how to best optimize your ad delivery and bidding strategy.

Launching, monitoring, and optimizing a B2B PPC campaign from start to finish can be overwhelming, especially if your marketing team doesn’t have the capacity to learn PPC and ensure that they can regularly nurture your campaigns as they go live.

Most businesses don’t hire just one full-time employee who helps them with PPC, and they might not have anyone available in their existing internal marketing department who is up for the task.

In such situations, the ideal solution is to hire an agency to run your PPC for you. A reliable agency will already know how to manage successful campaigns and will be able to get you up and running significantly faster than it would take you to get your internal teams up to speed.

When choosing the right B2B PPC agency to execute your marketing strategy in the most effective way possible, you’ll need to narrow down your options and find an agency that compliments your business and how you operate.

You’ll want to ensure they have a team of PPC experts who know how to get campaigns up and running strategically, and you’ll have to get together with them and see how well you get along with their team on a regular basis.

Once you know your team and their team have the capacity to get work done and are on the same page moving forward, you can reach out and start to form a working relationship.

We’ve given you a solid framework for B2B PPC throughout this guide, and you should be well equipped to discuss this topic with your agency. 

If your business is ready to begin working with a trusted B2B PPC agency that can take your marketing strategy to the next level, contact the GoingClear team today to discuss your B2B PPC goals.

In order to make the B2B PPC process easy to follow, we’ve developed a step-by-step checklist your business can use to create your pay-per-click campaign and implement it successfully. Download the checklist below!