Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation

If you enjoyed my last post, an interview with paid search expert Terry Whalen on paid search and B2B, you might want to join us for a webinar today, July 29th: 10 Secrets to Better B2B Paid Search Campaigns.

A recording will also be made available.

Here's the description:

If more than 90% of business buyers find the products or services they need through search, then why are B2B marketers finding it challenging to drive results in paid search campaigns?

The vast majority of paid search advertising through Google AdWords is focused on business to consumer (B2C). B2B companies rely on paid search to generate new leads, but B2B conversions are very different than a B2C company.

B2B companies are often simply hoping to capture a name to add to their marketing database so that they can begin the lead nurturing process, and sales cycles tend to be upwards of 12 months. ROI can take much longer to measure than in B2C, and you always need to preserve your brand.

Google is someplace you need to be, but managing your B2B Google AdWords campaigns can be very challenging.

Speakers Terry Whalen from CPC Search and Jason Stewart from Demandbase will share 10 helpful tips for managing your B2B Google Adwords campaigns, including:

• Update Your Campaigns for Quick Wins
• Integrate Google Adwords With Your CRM to Track ROI
• Content Match and B2B
• Find Those Keywords You Aren’t Thinking Of
• Analyzing the Value of Your Clicks … Even When They Don’t Convert

Terry Whalen is a partner at CPC Search, a full-service PPC management firm that optimizes PPC campaigns on behalf of its clients. Prior to running CPC Search, Terry led marketing initiatives at Citrix’s GoToMyPC, and he received his MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Jason Stewart leads online marketing programs for Demandbase and is the lead blogger at Demandblog. Jason has more than 10 years of online marketing and B2B lead generation and management experience. He founded and leads the Salesforce.com user group in Salesforce.com’s headquarters location (San Francisco) and was one of the first 500 certified Salesforce.com Certified Administrators.

Technorati Tags : B2B Marketing, CPC, CPC Search, Demandbase, Google AdWords, Jason Stewart, Paid Search, Terry Whalen

by Jason Stewart

I went to the recent SMX Advanced show in Seattle and attended a few of the paid search segments, but was disappointed by how B2C-focused the content was. There were a fair amount of B2B companies in attendance, and the organic search side was very informative and helpful, but for paid search there was a definite hole in the content when it came to B2B.

I met paid search consultant Terry Whalen recently, and thought it would be fun to ask him a few questions specifically related to paid search for B2B companies. Terry is a partner at CPC Search, a full-service PPC management firm that optimizes PPC campaigns on behalf of its clients. CPC Search is a Google AdWords Qualified Company. Prior to running CPC Search, Terry led marketing initiatives at Citrix’s GoToMyPC, and before that he received his MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

What are some of the key differences in running a B2B paid search campaign vs. a B2C campaign?
B2B is typically less straightforward than managing PPC programs for consumer-focused companies. Part of the reason for this is because it is often more difficult to measure value for companies where the sale happens offline. To illustrate, picture an e-commerce company selling products via credit card on its website. It’s relatively easy to measure revenue via Google AdWords using a ‘purchase’ conversion tag that passes through dynamic revenue variables to AdWords reporting. But for B2B we are typically only measuring a lead submission via AdWords, and all leads are not created equal. The value of a lead can be all over the map, because some leads are high-quality and some are low-quality. To get at the true value of leads we need to access data beyond AdWords or analytics – we need to go into the CRM. And, while this can certainly be done, it is not without additional challenges. Another important difference between consumer and B2B is that typically the SEM manager has fewer data points on which to optimize and grow the account. This is because – all other things being equal – cost/conversion is generally higher with B2B campaigns, and thus there are few conversions in a given time period on which to optimize.
Google is obviously the 800 lb gorilla, but how do the other search engines stack up for B2B?
The other search engines tend to do very poorly relative to Google when it comes to B2B. I know this after spending $100’s of thousands of dollars on Yahoo and MSN for b2b accounts. It becomes a return-on-effort problem. If you are lucky – for B2B – you might be able to spend $10 on Yahoo for every $90 you spend on Google. Again, that’s if you are very lucky with your particular vertical. We typically see that in terms of maximizing the overall ROI and total profit for our clients, our time is much better spent optimizing Google vs. spending time on the much smaller Yahoo campaigns. This is due not only to arithmetic, but also to the fact that Yahoo (and MSN) has a very poor advertiser interface relative to Google AdWords. MSN is rarely even a consideration for B2B accounts – although I actually like Bing, and adCenter could be a contender at some point if Bing continues to take market share.
What is typically the first thing you focus on in a new engagement with a B2B client? In other words, where can you usually find some quick wins?
Great question. We’ve seen a lot of money being wasted on Content, and we often have some triage to do. Triage can consist of adding negative placements (such as youtube.com and myspace.com), turning off certain categories (parked domains, etc.), and writing ads that very clearly state the advertiser’s value proposition. We also check to see that the Search Partner Network is yielding good results. For some B2B clients, Search Partner inventory does not convert well, or it drives lower quality traffic. After all, the search partners include sites like aol.com, shopping.com and ask.com – not exactly strong with business-oriented audiences relative to Google. Another one of our top to-do’s is to make sure that ad-serving is set to ‘rotate.’ This is very important for proper ad testing. In order to evaluate 2 or more ads, you need to make sure the ads have been rotated equally during the timeframe you are analyzing. Yet the AdWords default is to rotate the ad with the highest CTR more often. Good for Google in terms of monetizing search engine results pages (SERPs), but bad for the advertiser. Especially with B2B, we want to test ads that might be less “click-friendly” but in actuality may provide greater value to the advertiser (both in terms of a higher conversion rate and also higher lead quality).
Are there any tips or tricks that you see your B2C clients do that could carry over to B2B?
Not so much. For e-commerce clients we often use keyword-insertion (KWI) in our ad text. We can measure very easily if KWI is a good idea since we have actual revenue data flowing in at the ad level, and a conversion actually equals a purchase event. But for B2B we often shy away from using KWI, because there tend to be so many different user search queries that could be matched to our ad, and those queries might indicate very different user intents. If KWI is a bad idea, it will be much easier to see this with a B2C campaign – even within a day or two – right within the AdWords interface.
In a nutshell, when is it better to use exact match instead of phrase match?
Almost never. I almost think it’s the wrong question. For keywords that are either important to your business or that have high levels of impressions, clicks, spend or conversions, always use both. And always use negatives – either broad, phrase or exact match.
Do many of your B2B clients use the content network? How has your use of the content network changed over the past year?
Yes, they do. The Content network has become much more transparent, and the tools to move the levers up and down have gotten better. Due to better transparency and control, we use the Content network more than we did 12+ months ago. I think this will continue to be a trend. However, for B2B, if you can spend 20% of your AdWords budget on Content and have it perform to the same benchmark as your Search campaigns, you are doing very well.
How do you like the new Adwords interface, what are some of the pros and cons from a “power user” perspective?
I think it sucks much less than I thought it did 45 days ago (heh). We are getting more used to it. I think the ideas around it are very solid, but certainly latency is a big issue. I expect the interface to get faster and faster over time, and I expect we will like it more and more. At the end of the day, most hardcore campaign management and optimization takes place within Google’s AdWords Editor, so the new web interface is less of an issue for many folks.
You have recommended using Google Analytics to help find keywords, and there is also the keyword tool right inside of AdWords. Are there any third party tools you can recommend for finding relevant keywords?
I wouldn’t touch 3rd-party keyword tools with a 10-foot pole. Not because I think they do harm – it’s just because I don’t think they really do any good. Oftentimes in managing PPC campaigns, the trick is knowing where to focus your effort. I have never made money for myself or for clients using 3rd-party keyword tools (and yes – I have experimented a lot!). Google is actually pretty good at keyword relevancy (news flash!), and their keyword tool is powerful. If you are running a campaign on Google, why not rely on Google to help with keyword discovery? We also place a high importance on Google’s search query data to add keywords and negatives to our campaigns and ad groups. Google’s search query data is much, much better than it was (they announced a major improvement in search query granularity around April ’09), and it can yield a lot of great ideas *based on actual query data*. We also look at the organic query data within Google Analytics or whatever analytics package the client is using. Lastly, we do sometimes use compete.com or spyfu.com to look at competitive keyword data, but this rarely results in any action items for us since we are typically already testing or have tested any keywords that a competitor is running.
How do tools like Demandbase Professional, which allow you to analyze the “demographics” of the businesses visiting the landing pages associated with a particular ad group or keyword influence your decisions when monitoring a paid search campaign?
I think this information can help a lot. If the client sells enterprise software into F1000 companies and we see that we are attracting lower-tier users to our pages, that can affect things both at the keyword level and at the ad level. The really fun part is when you can ‘watch’ this data in real time or near real time, make changes, and see if they made an impact.
Your top ten Adwords tips are great….can you take it to 11?
You bet - I’m a big believer in taking it to 11! Start small, then go where the data takes you. Don’t start with 5 campaigns X 50 ad groups X 100 keywords in each ad group with 5 ads in rotation. Start smaller, and spend your time tweaking (or cutting your losses on) the poor performers and scaling and further optimizing the things that are working. We’ve achieved great results using this approach. I hope some of these tips help and thank you for listening!