How To Drive More Qualified B2B Leads From Your Google Adwords?

I started Broadcast2World 8 years ago, and for the first three years, we ranked across all the major keywords for our industry organically.

Then came Google updates and I realized the activities we were doing to rank in Google search came under black hat techniques.

We were penalized, and our keywords rank started to fall, it was also the time when Google started hiding the organic keywords driving leads for your business.

So, we were not able to analyze which keywords were generating the organic leads, and it is still the case.

Then we started investing in Google AdWords to generate B2B leads and cover the shortfall for organic leads.

I have worked with a lot of PPC companies in my entrepreneurial journey which has contributed to my expertise of Google AdWords.

The first golden rule is creating keyword-targeted ad groups for your video ads, though on the contrary Google will tell you to add 8-10 keywords which is not the right way to do it.

So, let’s say if you are creating an ad group for “commercial animation” it will look like something below:

These technique keeps your ads specific to your keyword and helps in increasing your quality score which further increases your chances of conversions and keeps your cost per conversion down at the same time.

Secondly, it’s good to use 2 step landing pages (example below), it helps you to engage the prospective customers and commit further while capturing the important information required to initiate a meaningful conversation with your customer.

In our case on the 1st step, we ask the client about the objective of creating the video.

On the 2nd step, we request the prospective customer to fill in the other details as shown below.

We also create hidden fields like keywords, keywords type, etc. and capture the following information to optimise the campaigns further.

We use Unbounce to create our landing pages as it is extremely user-friendly and has integration with all the popular tools we use for marketing and sales.

Further, we need to keep adding negative keywords to respective ad groups which will get your cost per lead down. The best match type to add negative keywords is a phrase.

Also, another important technique is to find common words repeating in your negative keywords and add them to negatives as the phrase match type.

For eg. there are two negative keywords "who animated the must be the honey commercial" and "who animated 1960s sugar crisp commercial", ‘who’ is repeating in both the negative keywords which might generate further similar negative keywords so we can put “who” in negative keywords list.

You can also use Wordstream to automate this task and optimising Google AdWords process for you.

We have been using HubSpot for our marketing and sales automation, so all the information captured is saved in HubSpot. We also segregate all our contacts in the following lifecycle stages:

1. Subscriber

• Prospects who have download marketing material from our website like eBook etc.
• Prospects who have subscribed to our blogs

2. Lead

• Subscribers who have taken one step further and sent an inquiry in any form, along with the contact details.
• Subscribers who have downloaded marketing material from your website like eBook white paper, case study, etc. and requested for a demo or consultation along with it.

3. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): Leads which have valid requirements for our services.

4. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): MQL’s which have defined budget for our services.

5. Customer: SQL’s which convert and sign the paperwork to get started with their project.

Now you can optimize Google AdWords based on the business conversions. When I say business conversions I mean keywords giving website visits which finally got converted to paying customers, that means keywords which are giving SQL - Sales Qualified Leads converting to customers.

Normally businesses doing Google AdWords only look at optimizing keywords giving conversions as tracked in AdWords directly but we should rather track which keyword is giving us which conversion so that we can at 1st level look at keywords giving us MQL - Marketing Qualified Leads, then SQL and finally customers.

People lot of times ask me how they should decide on which keywords to pause, and my answer is very simple based on your CAC - customer acquisition cost. But there are five levels of this final answer:

1. The first level is pausing the non-converted keywords based on the Search Terms, so if you are regularly reviewing your search terms and you see any keyword generating unqualified searches pause it right away. 

2. The second level is pausing non-converted keywords based on the Lead Cost, where if any keyword cost is more than 2x of your target lead cost pause it.

For example, If our target per lead cost is $100, we will pause the ad groups that have spent more than $200 and still have not given any conversions.

3. The third level is pausing keywords giving conversions, but those leads are not MQL.

4. The fourth level is pausing keywords which are giving MQL but not SQL, and keyword cost is greater than or equal to Customer Acquisition Cost.

For example, If your per lead cost is $10 and you can convert 1 paying customer out of every 10 leads (10% Conversion rate) then your customer acquisition cost will be $100 ($10/lead x 10 leads = 1 Paying Customer). So, we would pause the keywords with a cost per conversion of $100.

(Bonus Tip: You can set up and save filters in AdWords for this task so that you don’t need to look for keywords to pause manually)

5. The last level is pausing keywords which are giving SQL but not customers and keyword cost is more than equal to 2X of the CAC.

Example: In the example mentioned above, we will pause the keywords which are giving SQLs but not converting into the paying customers, and their cost per conversion is $200 (2 x $100 CAC).

The values defined above for pausing keywords might change based on your business, but the principles and stages remain same.

You can also capture search terms driving SQL’s and Customers for your SEO, which helps me to solve my earlier challenge of Google hiding keywords driving organic leads.

One last most important step is remarketing using Google AdWords for both display and video on YouTube as it helps in brand recall and builds trust with your prospective customers, it increases your chances of converting more prospects.

For any queries and help required, please write to us, I would love to contribute to your business growth.