B2B Marketing: Everything you need to know about Adwords to get started

B2B Marketing: Learn from the AdWords Mistakes of Others!

Google AdWords is a powerful B2B Marketing Service, but many small business owners don’t know how to use it correctly and so waste a lot of time and money for few sales.

It can be frustrating and expensive if you don’t know how to improve the rates at which people click on your ads.

Believe it or not, this is a good thing for you!

It means that, with a little help and a lot of testing, you can discover how to write great B2B marketing campaigns while your competitors throw up their hands in despair. You’ll have a marketing platform that few of your competitors have taken the time to master.

Learning from the mistakes and successes of others will put you miles ahead when you come to write your own ads.

So sit back, grab a pen to underline and highlight, and discover how to make your AdWords campaigns the most effective they can be.

Understanding Google Adwords Speak

To create your ads, you’ll need to understand the basic terminology and structure.

The Key Terms are as follows:

• Ads are the actual advertisements you want to show on Google. You can create one or more Ads and put these in an ‘Ad Group.’ AdWords advertisements have four lines of text that should be clear and user-friendly.
• An Ad Group allows you to group one or more ads together and display these in rotation when the Ad Group’s Keywords are typed into Google. Each Ad Group can have a maximum Cost-Per-Click (CPC) set for it, as well as CPC per keyword. You would normally have an Ad Group for each individual product or service you are advertising, or for specific groups of related keywords.
• The Keywords you choose for a given Ad Group are used to target your ads to potential customers. For example you may be an accounting firm, and so your keywords might be ‘accountant’, ‘accounting’, ‘tax accountants’, ‘Sydney accountants’ and so on—whatever words potential clients type to find products and services like yours (chapter 2 on how to find the best keywords for your business). Keep in mind that the longer your key phrases become, the cheaper the bid price gets and the more likely you will be targeting actual prospects ready to buy rather than students doing research.
• The Cost-Per-Click (CPC) is the price paid by an advertiser each time a user clicks on their ad. The maximum amount is set by the advertiser, not by Google. Prices typically range from a dollar to ten dollars per click. And you only pay for those viewers of the ad that click on it and visit a page on your site. You can completely control your cost and bid price.
• Impressions: these are the number of times that your Google Advertisement appears in a Google search.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR %): this is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click. So it’s the number of times the ad is clicked expressed as a percentage of the total amount of times it appears in a Google search. This is an important indicator for the performance of a campaign. Generally, a CTR of 0.7% and above is considered acceptable, but Lead Creation generally aims for 3% or more.
• A Campaign consists of one or more Ad Groups. You can set a budget on the total spend, and target the Ad Groups (and therefore ads) to specific sites/landing pages, languages, countries, cities, and even to a specific local area (for example, a 30 mile radius around your business location.)
• Ad Copy is the words in your ad which get people to click and go to your website. At this point, it is worth clarifying: these ads don’t directly sell; they just warm-up the customer-to-be. They ask for clicks. They get the prospect to your site where they can buy or register to download something.
• Your Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s Click-Through-Rate (CTR) on Google’s (top secret) algorithm, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and Landing Page. You can control your score by following the rules found later in this chapter. Put simply, a high score means you pay less, and you position better within search results.
• Your Landing Page is the web page where customers will ‘land’ when they click your ad. The web address for this page is often called a ‘destination URL’ or ‘Click-Through URL.’

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Cheers, Toby  [B35]

B2B Marketing expert, Toby Marshall, is the founder of LC