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8 Min
Google Ads can be an effective direct response/demand capture channel when run correctly.
More often, it is a budget-wrecking money pit.
Success with paid search is much more about capping your downside, then striving for upside.
But unless you’re an experienced performance marketer, it can be hard to know how to effectively cap your downside without diminishing the effectiveness of your quality, high ROAS campaigns.
I’m a big believer in the 80/20 rule. Identify the big levers that have the biggest impact and act on those. Below I’ve outlined what those levers are for improving efficiency with Google Ads based on my experience across dozens of B2B SaaS accounts.
They’re not absolutes, so I’ve also included context outlining exceptions to these “rules”. And of course, do your own research based on your organization, market, products and personas.
Let’s dig in.
I’ve seen a lot of accounts that have this setting turned on and they don’t even understand what it means. Once I show them the output and the data, there is never a debate.
If your paid search campaigns have this setting enabled, then you are not only serving ads that show at the top of a search engine results page, you’re also running display ads on Google’s network. You have limited control over these placements and your targeting abilities are trash.
Not to mention if you showed your design team how these display ads appear they'd accuse you of treason.
Somehow the data is even uglier.
You’ll see the massive impression numbers and cheap cost-per-click and think “well that’s not too bad.” But then you check the abysmal click-through-rate (primarily driven by fat-finger mobile clicks) and the non-existent conversion rate and you’ll realize the vast majority of impressions and clicks are vapor.
Luckily this is a super easy fix that takes only a few minutes.
First, quickly check if your campaigns are currently running on the display network.
If the icon next to your campaigns looks like this
then you are in the clear.
However, if the icon looks like this
it means that you are running ads on the display network.
To disable the display network, go into your campaign settings, select the dropdown for “Networks” and uncheck the “Include Google Display Network” box.
See, super easy fix.
Maybe if:
You are a large company with a massive paid search budget and your goal is to get your name out to any and every one regardless of context or brand standards.
I’m hard pressed to find a situation where I’d recommend keeping the display network turned on for paid search ads.
Running traditional display ads on Google’s Display Network is a different story, but this one-click option to create display ads based off of your paid search ads is a waste of budget.
This one can be insanely costly if you don’t know what you’re doing. It's also what Google encourages marketers to do.
Google Ads has three keyword match types that can trigger your ad to serve based on a query. I’ve created the chart below to help illustrate. As an example let’s use the keyword: “Whitewater Paddleboards” as our search term.
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The word “broad” in “broad match” is doing some heavy lifting. In my experience the loosest, most tangential affiliation to a word is enough for Google to throw an ad at it.
When you use broad match keywords, you’ll find they are cheaper on a cost-per-click basis and you’ll get more overall impressions, but these keywords will bring a lot of irrelevant traffic to your website.
When running demand capture campaigns for B2B SaaS, specificity is critical. Your prospects are going to use very specific, persona and industry language when they are researching software during a buying motion.
To run a cost-effective Google Ads account for B2B SaaS you’ll want to lean heavily on high commercial intent keywords using the exact or specific phrase match type.
Be sure to measure effectiveness, not only using cost-per-click and click-through-rate, but also cost-per-lead and cost-per-opportunity metrics further down the funnel.
Maybe If: You have a large budget, a large TAM and time to learn.
Running broad match terms often can result in more top of funnel conversions, but those conversions don't convert as well into revenue, particularly for B2B SaaS.
Increasingly, Google is placing more emphasis on intent, search history and demographics when determining which ads to run.
If you pair broad match keywords with a smart bidding strategy targeting a specific ROAS you can see costs per conversion that can match what you see with exact bidding strategies.
However, this takes time as Google trains its algorithm based on the results of your campaigns which can result in a long slog through inefficiency.
I get the appeal.
Your competitors customers are your future customers. You want to get in front of these prospects any chance you get, right?
Not if your goal is to get conversions and demo requests.
Most often, when people search for a brand on Google, they are doing what is called a navigational search. Which means they are using the search bar to get to a website instead of the address bar.
This is not much different than direct traffic.
One of the shortcomings with paid search is that you can’t target based on active buying intent.
Conventional B2B marketing wisdom is that only 10% of your target market is actively in a buying motion. Our goal with demand capture campaigns is to specifically target that 10%.
Bidding blindly on competitor keywords means that at least 90% of those impressions are going to go to folks who are not even considering making a switch.
Compounding this is that many B2B and SaaS companies have a login portal on their website. Which means you could be wasting your ad budget on irrelevant impressions served to users that are not part of your target buying personas.
Capping it all off is you’re going to be paying a premium for those clicks, especially if your competitors are running their own branded campaigns.
Sure competitive takeaway campaigns can be fun, but it is extremely rare for a competitive keyword have a ROAS that justifies the spend.
Maybe if:
This one has more exceptions to the rule. Competitive keyword campaigns can be effective if:
While you’re at it, why stop at your competitors' branded keywords. You should probably also stop bidding on your own branded terms.
This is counterintuitive and might be considered a “hot take” but IMO branded paid search is that person in a group project that doesn’t contribute anything but still gets the credit.
In nearly every case, your branded search campaigns are going to be your best performing campaigns by nearly any metric.
I’d go as far to say that for many accounts they are the only campaigns that are showing an acceptable ROAS.
So why turn them off?
Because you were going to get those clicks and conversions anyways.
The people that are typing your brand name into a search engine are not searching, they’re navigating. They were coming to you with intent.
I get the trepidation. This is a big move. But it’s also easily testable and, if needed, reversible.
To test, first understand the baseline conversions you get from your branded campaigns over a given period. How long this period is should be based on consistency and volume but two to four weeks is a good benchmark.
Pause your branded campaigns for that period.
Then analyze the data.
Here is a quick way to break it down.
Let’s say you have $10,000 allocated to branded paid search. With that $10,000 you average 40 demo requests per month giving you a CPL of $250.
And let’s say during the month you pause your brand campaigns, you lose the 40 demo requests from paid search, but you gain 35 demo requests from organic search. So overall, you have a loss of 5 conversions.
The question you have to ask yourself is “Are those 5 lost conversions worth the $10,000 spend?”
In other words, if your branded conversions had a CPL of $2,000 instead of $250, would you still run the campaign? Or would that budget be better allocated elsewhere?
It’s a legit question. To make that determination for yourself, you need to know your win-rate for branded paid search leads down the funnel, your ACV and your CAC.
Depending on the effectiveness with which you win branded paid search leads down the funnel, it very well may make sense to keep the campaigns running.
If you’re not ready to commit to pausing them right now, you should at least be sure you’re analyzing them separately from your non-branded keywords and not blending the cost per lead across the entire account because they can really skew the numbers and cause you to over-index your budget towards paid search.
Maybe if: You’ve run the numbers yourself and found that pausing the campaign does have a negative impact on your overall numbers considering true cost per lead and opportunity.
The other place where brand campaigns can be effective is when using phrase match keywords like “[brand pricing], [brand demo] [brand reviews] [brand alternatives] etc., particularly if you don’t own a top 3 organic placement for those phrases.
Good demand generation marketers drive a lot of leads, great demand generation marketers drive a lot of pipeline.
MQL’s don’t matter if they don’t reliably translate into pipeline.
I once audited an account being run by an external agency that saw one keyword generate 248 demo requests in a quarter.
If you stopped there, you would think that campaign was an absolute success.
But looking further, we found that of those 248 demo requests, less than a dozen converted into an SQO and none of them progressed to the pipeline stage.
All of that budget was a complete waste.
As marketers, we need to get away from the mindset of just lobbing leads over to sales and calling it a day. That’s being a bad partner for your sales team and diminishes the impact that marketing can have on revenue.
Fortunately, this is an easy fix.
Just make sure to integrate your Google Ads account and your Salesforce account and you’ll be able to see which keywords and ad groups are responsible for generating opportunities and closed-won deals and how cost-effectively they are doing so.
This can help you effectively decide which keywords you should keep running, which you should focus on optimizing and which you can get rid of altogether.
With paid search in B2B SaaS the 80/20 rule is generally the case. 80% of your pipeline is being generated by 20% of your keywords.
But you don’t know that unless you track your leads all the way through your opportunity stages.
Maybe if: You’re an agency that promises “leads” and nothing more.
Those are the 5 checks I’d make on my account in order to cap my downside and run an efficient Google Ads account for your business.
I’ll reiterate that context is important. Your industry, target personas, competition, budget and category are all factors to consider. Make sure to run the numbers yourself and make informed decisions.
If you have any questions, please feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn and check back for more B2B Demand Gen tips and strategies each week.
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