This article is for new and veteran users of Google Ads. As long as your business is B2B or SaaS (or both) you will find some value out of this post.
Maybe you’re struggling with ways to improve your ROI, maybe you are not seeing success in your ads. Either way this should serve as a starting point for you to get more from B2B & SaaS Google Advertising dollars.
I touch on this in every blog post but it is really relevant here. I see so many Google Ad accounts being handled like B2C accounts and it’s costing them. It’s costing you in some way too I bet.
Google is largely geared towards B2C advertisers. When it comes to using Google’s optional automations, B2C brands can really thrive off the bat with automated strategies.
However, for B2B and SaaS companies just starting off with Google Ads, the automated bidding strategies aren’t going to work as well for you in most cases. Google just doesn’t know enough about your niche market to help you.
Especially if you have a lower budget.
These strategies kill it in B2C because there is so much data (crazy high amounts of search volume) which feeds Google’s algorithms.
But if you’ve made it this far you probably aren’t advertising on keywords like “red running shoes.”
So unless your B2B product is something with tons of search volume (I.e. calendar software, social media scheduling software, invoicing software, you get it) then you can’t depend on Google’s algorithms to serve you well in your market.
It’s recommended by Google to wait until your B2b or SaaS is receiving 30ish primary conversions per month to allow enough data for your account to benefit from Google’s algorithms.
Until then, you’re stuck with good old manual CPC.
If you must run automated strategies, I would recommend making sure your campaigns contain keywords with similar volumes to avoid wasted ad spend.
If you don’t have the tools to check keyword volume, make sure that keywords of the same match types have the same number of words.
A lot of the accounts I audit are experiencing cannibalization from one keyword. AKA a lot of wasted ad spend for your B2B or SaaS.
For example, if you have a campaign running max conversions that has the keywords “social media scheduler” in phrase match and “white label social media scheduling tool,” you will see the prior eat up 90-100% of your budget.
This is an issue because the second keyword is a much better keyword which will probably be more valuable.
To prevent this, keep these keywords in separate campaigns with separate budget controls.
So this is something I added in late but it’s extremely important.
Another form of cannibalization is in the form of mixing your B2B and B2C intents in Google Ads.
You can waste a lot of spend showing up for B2C searches when you don’t want to.
More so than B2B, B2C users will click on anything, no matter how specific your ad copy is.
And no matter what your industry is, if you are showing up for B2C & B2B, 80% of your clicks will go to B2C users because the costs are cheaper and the volume is higher. There’s two ways to try to go around this.
If you have the volume, add words like “for business” or “enterprise” (some industries have better insider terms).
I.e. “IT services” will waste a lot of your Google Ads dollars. “IT Services For Business” will be spot on.
If you are struggling for volume when you add these words on, you can try broad but tread lightly and keep a close eye on search terms.
Another way to prevent wasting clicks on B2C clicks is by taking the same search campaign that is attracting the B2C clicks and select a few audiences to target.
This is a more experimental method but I have seen cheaper clicks and higher conversion rates in some cases than identical, non-audience-targeting counterparts.
Something to consider if you are stuck.
Let’s get this out of the way, you have to track conversions in B2B to ensure you are getting value out of your campaigns.
You may be pretty sure what keywords apply to your product, but B2B buyers are more finnicky with their searches than B2C.
Don’t waste your B2B’s money in Google Ads if you don’t need to.
Track conversions and don’t just track page engagement, although that can be helpful up front, you also need to track meaningful conversions.
It can be tedious to set this up, but you will be wishing you did once you’ve wasted $3000 dollars in search ads in the first month and have no idea where it went.
How much does your product cost your target B2B user?
What’s the average time to sale?
Do they consider two products before converting or ten?
Can they buy online or do they need to talk to a sales person?
If you want to avoid wasting Google ad spend in the long run for your B2B or SaaS it’s important that you are tracking every step along the buyer journey.
The $10/month SaaS solution can probably value free trials or work email submissions a lot higher than if your product or service costs $100,000.
To be clear, when I first start a B2B or SaaS Google Ads campaign, I am absolutely optimizing in the first month off of higher funnel conversions like engagement, newsletter sign-ups and other low-value actions.
You have to do this early on especially with crazy high-value B2B sales because you can’t expect sales that often if you are spending $1,000-$5,000 a month at the start.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set yourself up for success down the road.
Eventually, you will need to start focusing on the conversions that matter.
Whether that’s sales, sales qualified leads, meetings attended, or whatever it is. Taking that next step in quality will ensure that you are bringing value.
There are many times I go into a B2B ads account that has an awesomely low cost per conversions but then I look at what conversions are being tracked and it’s things like pageviews and location clicks which can be misleading.
A lot of SaaS/B2B Google Ads campaigns waste spend thinking they are targeting a hyper-valuable keyword and neglecting the fact that they are actually showing for a variety of terms unrelated to their product.
Find some keywords that are spending the most (if applicable, find the ones that are spending a lot and not converting).
Select the check mark and look at the search terms that are actually triggering your ads for this keyword.
If you need a refresher on the difference between search terms and keywords, here’s an article.
The terms in this report, at most, represent 70% of the actual searches that trigger your ad.
That means you should even be scrutinizing the single-impression terms.
If you look at any given search term report and more than 50% of the terms are ‘kind of relevant’ at best, then you should be getting rid of that keyword or doing some serious slashing with negative keywords.
A really commonly overlooked spot for wasted ad spend in B2B and SaaS is on the Search Network.
As a default Google enables your search ads to show on the Search Network which allows your B2B and SaaS ads to show up on other websites that use Google’s search bar algorithms.
It isn’t an objectively bad practice to keep Search Network on, but if you are not struggling for volume, I would investigate further.
You can do this at the campaign, ad group, ad, and keyword level but to simplify the investigation to start, let’s look at the campaign level.
Segment your campaigns by network and take a look at the cost and cost per conversion columns.
Are your ads performing well in the search partners network? If they are tanking your cost per conversion, I would recommend turning it off in settings.
Bonus: never turn on the display network for a B2B or SaaS search campaign unless you are desperate to test something out (and lose money).
You can also segment your campaigns by device, which can help you determine if a certain device is performing better or worse.
If a certain device is wasting your B2B Google Ads spend, the nice thing is you can make bid adjustments at the campaign level.
This allows you to still get impressions across the board but alter your bids to reflect a device level conversion rates.
Note: often B2B and SaaS buying decisions are made on the computer, however, your user may use their device to do initial research and convert later on the computer.
Another opportunity to use the segment breakdown. This time use the click type segmentation and check out where your conv. rates are highest.
It’s rare that I see ad extensions wasting B2B Google Ads spend but once in a while you’ll see an issue where your low funnel keywords have ad extensions that distract from the original intent of the search.
In that case, you will see a lot of money spent on ad extension clicks (rather than headline clicks) and way less conversions.
If you see this in the segmented view, go into your ad extensions and alter which extensions show with each campaign.
Hopefully your campaigns are organized by intent, which should give you some guidance on the buyer’s mentality when seeing your ads.
For example, I know it’s tempting to have it because it’s easy, but I rarely see the use in having an “About Us” extension on your B2B or SaaS ads. Especially on ads for terms like “enterprise social media scheduling tool.”
This just allows the user to click on a page that probably isn’t geared to convert, increasing your chance of a wasted click.
I listed the ones that are common ad spend wasters in my experience, but if I am optimizing a bad (or great) campaign, I go through all of the segmentations just to give myself some perspective.
In most cases, optimizing and reducing wasted ad spend are the same thing.
Some other honorable mentions in segments include location, time (any time breakdown), & Top Vs Other.
Another way to say this is “your CPCs are too high.” But as obvious as that seems, I would recommend checking out a few columns:
A metric of how many of your impressions are in the top position compared to all of your impressions in total.
One way to waste a lot of spend in Google Ads (especially for very expensive B2B and SaaS markets) is by tailoring your CPCs to land you in the first spot of the search results.
This top spot typically comes at a major jump in click cost and will perform similarly to the next 3-4 spots.
Heck, if you have a lot of search volume in your market, you can have a lot of flexibility with your CPCs.
Try incrementally bringing your Max CPCs down if your B2B Search Ads are using Manual CPC bid strategies.
If you are still spending your budget, there is no need to be striving for high CPCs, your conversion rates should be around the same no matter where your ad places.
This metric is only visible at the campaign level but it lets you know if you left clicks on the board at your current CPC.
Basically, if you have over 30% in this column, you can slightly lower your max CPCs and get more clicks for the same budget.
Another way to look at a 30% Search Lost IS (Budget) is that you can increase your budget and expect similar results without touching any other settings.
If your B2B or SaaS ads are not yet at an ROI that you want, I would recommend keeping this number low.
This percentage tells you how many impressions your ads got for a certain campaign, ad group, or keyword versus how many impressions were available.
If you feel like your Search Ads are leaking money, check this column, you probably don’t want to be at 80%+ if you have yet to optimize this dimension.
This section applies to specifically competitor campaigns (yes your competitor terms should be in a separate campaign).
For the record, I think competitor campaigns are a great way to get positive ROI early on in B2B search ad campaigns. If you pick the right competitors to target you can see really fast success.
You have to pick the right competitors, though.
Here’s a common scenario I see: A B2B advertiser that offers a very specific service/product. They chose to target a competitor who also offers that product/service but they also offer a variety of other services/products/features that the advertiser doesn’t.
What ends up happening is that their ad shows for a user who searches that company name and the ad text reads “better than competitor.” So the user clicks it.
However, one out of five times, that user is looking for a service or feature that isn’t offered by the advertising B2B or SaaS so they leave.
For example, DataSpark, who offers listing analytics for Walmart marketplace listings could target Helium10 who offers those services for Walmart and Amazon.
Targeting [Helium10] in exact match might feel really safe.
Turns out a ton more people are interested in listing their products on Amazon, which DataSpark doesn’t offer services for. So the users who landed on their Walmart-oriented landing page just bounced immediately.
Our solution, we started targeting keywords like “helium10 for walmart” which at this point is hitting 3x ROI.
When I am conducting an audit, these are some of the first thing I look at.
I’ll do a segment on optimization through campaign structure some day because those concepts are more gradual and take a little more testing and strategy.
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