B2B/SaaS Search Ads Strategy: Surprisingly Easy & Effective

Before you dive into this 100% comprehensive SaaS search ads strategy, it’s important that the reader acknowledge that the days of complicated, intricate Google Ads accounts are behind us.

The art of the advertiser is in understanding how to feed Google so that you can balance your goals with Google’s settings and algorithms.

Setting Up Your SaaS Google Ads Strategy. Planning For The Growth Of Your Ads Account.

Setting up your Ad campaigns structure has little to do with the actual settings in Google ads. Rather, understanding Google’s match-types, responsive search ads and algorithms.

With this, you can create a campaign where you have control while playing to the strengths of the black box that is Google’s algorithms. 

Google Ads is changing how success looks for every industry but if you are a SaaS or B2B, success in Search Ads is not identical to what B2C ‘ad gurus’ are spinning. 

This is the first part of a two part series. The second part being about how to optimize an account that’s been running with the ‘insanely easy setup’ for a month.

This SaaS Google Ads strategy setup is for advertisers who are familiar with the platform and want to get the most out of their accounts in 2022.

Know What Your Budget Can Handle (# Of Keywords)

The first and most foundational concept to understand is how many keywords a B2B/SaaS search ads budget can support.

Many veteran users will start an account, throw a hundred keywords into it and after spending $3k/month for 3 months, wonder why they haven’t seen their ROI hit 1 yet.

Optimization happens at the keyword level. An advertiser can only optimize once a certain number of clicks has been aggregated per keyword. 

Given that the smallest sample size considered to be statistically significant is 30, you should be waiting until a keyword has 30 clicks before you pause or make significant changes to it.

Here’s a chart to highlight how the number of keywords you start with can delay optimization time.

Note, Search Click Boom finds that for SaaS / B2B clients, the average click costs $6.56.

With the simple start method, being able to make significant changes (optimizations & cutting wasteful keywords) after one month is a big part of the strategy.

The faster you can optimize, the faster you can sustainably start to grow.

You can always add more keywords once your ads are meeting your goals.

In summary, make sure every keyword in your starting structure can get 30 clicks per month. 

B2B/SaaS CPCs vary greatly depending on your industry so allow for slight differences depending on which you’re in.

Note: using tools to determine what your average CPC might be can be helpful but should never be fully relied on.

Balancing SaaS/B2B Keyword Volume & Quality

Targeting similar volumes and qualities of keywords in each campaign will be an important part of distributing your clicks evenly over all your keywords in a campaign.

Look at this set of keywords:

Can you guess which of these relative to the rest will have the best quality traffic and lowest volume and vice versa?

Here’s Google’s description of match types if you need a frame of reference. Don’t overthink it.

Being able to identify, without tools and without running ads, which keywords will render similar quality and volume in Google Ads is a skill you will need.

Why? It can determine how to organize ad groups and campaigns so your budget isn’t dominated by a few keywords.

It will also help you understand how to target the best quality keywords that your budget will allow for.

More detail on this later, but first let’s see what the right answer to the question above is:

[Walmart SEO] and “SEO tool for walmart” are the highest quality and lowest volume terms in this example.

The concept directly relates to how many words there are in a keyword and the match type (which determines the constraint).

Using Feature/Benefit/Use Keywords For SaaS/B2B

High-competition B2B or SaaS markets such as “calendar software” or “process automation,” can be tough to crack. It is important to understand what sets your software apart from the competition in the search results.

The good news is that high competition normally means high volume, meaning you can target low-funnel terms and still spend your budget.

High-competition strategy says to cut through the noise with your strengths and have a landing page that sells them (and your product has to be good). 

Quick definitions:

• Feature/Benefit Keywords: B2B/SaaS users search for high competition services based on what features they have or how they can improve their lives with them.
  • Example: easy process automation software, calendar booking tool for team meetings
• Use Keywords: These keywords indicate that the broader software is good for certain uses. Having a landing page for specific uses can raise conv. rates significantly.
  • Example: Landing page builder for SaaS, enterprise swag management tool

Ideas for these modifier keywords can come from typing your seed keyword in Google and letting the suggestions give you some ideas.

Uncertain Keywords vs Certain Keywords.

Finally, keywords that you think ‘might work’ have no place in your strategy.

You know your business, you know the industry terms for your software/service, you don’t need to guess.

If your SaaS provides businesses with a way to automate their onboarding processes don’t target “process automation” just because the user searching it ‘could’ be searching for your service.

The volume is there, target “onboarding automation software.”

If the search term has other meanings as well, don’t let your term show for those ones just because you ‘could be relevant.’

Down the road when you have extra budget to spend from having successful Google Ads campaigns, you can try to optimize less-relevant terms.

Putting Your SaaS/B2B Google Ads Strategy Together

To again frame this conversation, your B2B/SaaS Google Ads strategy has to come from an understanding of simplicity.

The advertiser has lost so much control in Google Ads that the game of controlling every search that triggers your ads is over. 

Now Google Ads strategy is about using the right sized paintbrush to target your audiences and allowing Google to control the individual bristles.

Simple Structure At The Campaign Level

At the campaign level, there are a few dimensions that constitute splitting into multiple campaigns.

• Intent (funnel level)
  • High funnel
  • Low funnel
  • Competitor
• Experimental level
  • Tight matching
  • Loose matching
• Bid strategy
  • Manual CPC
  • Max Conversions
  • The rest are irrelevant for this conversation

The ideal account/campaign structure will look something like this:

Most SaaS companies that I create Google Ads strategies for really only offer one service, but if you have multiple product offerings, then this structure might be for each one separately.

Campaign 1 is targeting the longtail, high-quality keywords and eating up most of the budget. From the previous example it would consist of these types of keywords (in red):

Campaign 2 either loosens keywords up by match type or drops a qualifying term:

• [Walmart SEO] goes from exact match to phrase match “Walmart SEO”
• “SEO tool for Walmart” in phrase match would also become “Walmart SEO”

This allows you to keep your intent but let’s Google find other relevant terms to show your ads for.

Boiled Down Ad Group Structure

As mentioned before, most SaaSs only offer one service.

If you’re in a low competition, low volume market, you can stick to a very generic landing page.

If your SaaS or B2B:

• Offers more than one service
• Is targeting very specific use cases like “salon booking tool”

Then you may need different ad groups to separate intents and landing pages.

Otherwise, Google will actually benefit from getting some context behind your searches by looking at all the keywords in the ad group. 

In part two, we will cover when to split them up into their own ad groups and campaigns.

It really is that simple for ad groups.

Nowadays, if you get too finite with your ad groups, you will see overlap and your data will become messing.

For example: a search for “appointment booking tool” could trigger “meeting booking tool” in one ad group or “appointment scheduling tool” in another.

This will only confuse you as you try to identify which keywords are working in your account.

Use your judgment, if you can make one ad relevant to all the keywords in the group, then likely you can just have one. Relevance does not equal exactly matching words.

Note: sometimes if your features attract very different users, you can split ad groups to revolve around each feature.

Understanding how match types can allow cleaner data capture for your SaaS search ads

Once you have a general idea of your ad group structure, it’s time to put keywords in them.

Selecting your keywords follows the same philosophy as selecting ad groups. Simplify as much as possible.

You don’t need a bunch of slightly different keywords. If your keywords are similar enough, consolidate them and let match types help.

In the example above, why would you target three different keywords that you are unsure of their effecacy?

Instead, enable one keyword that would encompass all of them in phrase match without sacrificing too much ‘control.’

Again, it’s about consolidating your data and growing from there. 

Once you see what is working, you break it off and dial in to the next level of specificity. 

Conclusion “Why SaaS Google Ads Strategies Are Changing”

Google wants to become more user friendly so that everyone can succeed using Google Ads (more like spend money). 

In the name of that, Google wants “over-complicated” to be a thing of the past.

Truthfully, the job of the Google advertiser has shifted from tedious keyword manager to strategizer and Google algorithm researcher.

We guide rivers now rather than shoot arrows. 

Google’s match types are looser (less control), Google reveals less search term data, and doesn’t let you determine what ad copy shows per search.

In exchange, Google looks at contexts within ad groups and campaigns and matches search copy, bids and keywords with data-backed information to try to get your SaaS the best results.

So now, it is the job of the search advertiser (you) to understand all of this and get your account profiting before Google eats up all of your money!

Thanks for reading!