Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has evolved quite a bit since it first began in the early days of the internet.
Metrics like cost per click (CPC) remain an important part of the conversation, while others (like average position) have retired.
This guide aims to simplify the Ads account structure strategy for B2B campaigns.
We’ll cover the following:
- Which metrics are important today and likely to remain relevant in the future?
- There is a lot of interconnectivity between PPC metrics, and it can be daunting to know which relationships to build strategy around.
- Key PPC metrics for B2B: We define PPC as any channel where you pay per click (e.g., Google Search, Display, YouTube). This includes some video and social metrics.
Relationships between metrics and their importance in the B2B domain.
While there’s a case to be made for every metric playing a role in your account choices, these are the top relationships to focus on if you are doing B2B PPC ads campaigns.
Understanding the relationship between key metrics in B2B PPC advertising is crucial for optimizing campaigns and achieving business objectives. Here’s why this understanding is important:
Data-Driven Insights: By analyzing metrics like Conversion Rate, Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), marketers can make informed decisions about where to allocate budgets and which strategies to pursue.
Budget Allocation: Metrics such as Cost Per Lead (CPL) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) provide insights into the financial efficiency of marketing efforts.
Lead Quality Assessment: Monitoring metrics such as engagement rates and conversion rates helps assess lead quality, ensuring that marketing efforts are not just attracting clicks but also generating valuable leads.
Audience Insights: In niche B2B industries, the keyword volume are quite low. It becomes crucial to monitor metrics to help in understanding audience behavior and preferences. For example, analyzing CTR alongside demographic data can reveal which segments respond best to specific ads, allowing for better-targeted campaigns
CTR And Conversion Rate
The most critical relationship to focus on is CTR vs. conversion rate. As a B2B company conversions and revenue matter the most. These two metrics can decide the success of your campaigns and help you win customers.
If your CTR is really good and your conversion rate is not, there are a few potential optimization strategies that you can explore:
- Is the landing page letting you down?
- The ads are engaging, but they target people who aren’t quite ready to purchase.
- Adding more prequalifying language into the ads can solve this. Targeting is outright incorrect, and the clicks are accidental.
When CTR is low but the conversion rate is good, the fixes will be a little different:
- The ad creative may not be enticing enough. You may want to be more direct in asking folks to contact you or order now.
- Your budget may not support prime-time bidding, so you end up serving a lot during off-hours when folks are less likely to engage. You can correct this with an ad schedule to force budgets to only spend during peak hours.
- There may be a double or triple counting issue, where you’re getting more than one conversion count per click. Use the “conversion action” segment to identify any false positives.
When both are good or bad, it can be a little tougher to know where to focus optimization or scale efforts.
Average CPC and Search Terms/Placement Type
When Average CPCs Are Low
Check for Branded Queries in Non-Branded Campaigns
Action: Review your campaigns to identify if branded terms are inadvertently included in non-branded campaigns.
Tip: Avoid using broad match keywords and maintain a comprehensive negative keywords list to filter out unwanted branded queries.
Monitor Non-Search Placements
Action: Analyze your ad placements to ensure that your search budget isn’t being used for non-search placements.
Consideration: While non-search placements can be effective, overbidding on these can deplete your search budget without yielding satisfactory results.
Evaluate Impression Share
Action: Check your impression share metrics.
Guideline: If you are losing more than 50% of your impression share due to rank, it indicates that you may be limiting your ad volume excessively, which could hinder profitability.
When Average CPCs Are High
Identify Accidental Duplicates
Action: Conduct a thorough review of your keyword list to find any duplicates that may cause internal competition.
Indicator: If you see the status “another eligible keyword was chosen” more than 25% of the time for a keyword, it’s essential to clean up close variant duplicates.
Optimize Keyword Management
Action: Regularly assess and refine your keyword strategy.
Focus: Ensure that you are not bidding against yourself by consolidating similar keywords and eliminating unnecessary variants.
Utilize Search Terms Data
Action: Leverage available search terms data to make informed decisions about keyword bids and placements.
Strategy: Use insights from search terms to adjust bids for high-performing keywords while reducing spend on underperformers.
CPA And ROAS’s Influence On Volume
One reason Smart Bidding (Max Conversions and Max Conversion Value) catches a lot of heat is that people don’t fully understand how to help them learn profitable budget allocation.
It is very normal for a brand-new account using Smart Bidding to have a bad experience if they don’t have enough conversions (30+) in a 30-day period.
When you need volume, CPAs and ROAS have to be more conservative. For example, you might be willing to take a INR 1000 CPA on a INR 15000 product/service. The ROAS goal would be 15x.
This mindset is really important for product/company launches, as well as if you are facing a shortage of leads.
Conversely, if you’re under scrutiny for marketing costs, you may set more aggressive goals, so each customer is worth more (even if you get fewer of them).
In B2B as the price of each sale is high, running the campaigns in “Max conversion” makes sense.
These metrics are weighted in the auction:
- Conversions: To calculate ROI on paid campaigns
- CTR: Analyse the Ad copies
- CPC: Bidding strategies
- Quality score: While this is not officially weighted in the auction anymore, the core signals informing it still are.
Google Ads Quality Score is based on three components:
- Landing page experience
- Expected click-through rate
- Ad relevance
Final Thoughts
These metrics are your “go win:”
CPA/ROAS: Are you making enough money off of your ads? If not, adjust targets. Impression share: Based on what, if any, is lost to, make structural, bidding, or budgeting changes
Conversion rate/CTR: Are the account and website supporting each other in winning business, and do you trust the reporting of both?
Metrics like Ad Strength and optimization score are friendly suggestions but don’t actually impact your account performance.
It can be tough to know where to focus on your ad account.
Hopefully, this review of the metrics and their relationships to each other helps you prioritize what to focus on, report on, and act on.
