B2B Web Strategy Blog – eMagine

Don’t sabotage your own PPC campaign

September 9th, 2009 Posted by: Bill Gadless

I recently saw an interesting post about Pay Per Click …actually an interview of CPC Search’s Terry Whalen, conducted and written up by Jep Castelein over at LeadSloth.

Having done both myself, I can agree with Terry that B2B PPC is more of a challenge to get right than B2C …mainly because the lower lead volumes and longer sell cycles imply longer testing periods and ROI measurements.  As a result of this, it pays to be much more cautious in crafting ad text and keyword selection;  whereas in a B2C, we can test some really crazy-seeming ideas, because they can be killed fairly quickly if needed.

This “law of numbers” further varies with… the size of your target market;  if you’re addressing only CIOs of Fortune 1000 enterprises, your search volumes will obviously be much smaller – and testing cycle times much longer – than those of a firm whose market is, say, all software developers.

Here are some more of Terry’s thoughts in his own words …before I come back with a few comments:

On PPC results tracking:
“For the most part, clients use Salesforce-for-AdWords, which is a very elegant way to link leads with valuable AdWords data like keyword, search term, campaign, etc.  For clients that are using marketing automation platforms like Marketo or Eloqua, there is a bit more integration to do, but the links can still be made to work.  …The most important piece of data is the search query – so, if you can just get a hidden field to capture this data and connect it with a lead, you are ahead of the game.”

On lead scoring:
“Lead scoring can be a great way to speed up the time required before we know if we’re on the right track with certain keyword groups and ad messaging, without having to wait for the lead to have been closed (won, lost, etc.).”

On landing pages:
“I think it’s important to be clear .. about what it is that your company brings to the table, include the lead form on the page, have the cursor already be in the first field (if possible), and include at least a logo that will take users to the home page if there is no other navigation available on the page.”  Also, you can shorten or lengthen your lead form to achieve the right balance between conversion rate and lead quality.

On effective offers:
“Trials, then webinars, then white papers.”

And now, my comments…
On results tracking, landing pages and offers, I believe Terry is spot on.  On lead scoring, I would hold up a big caution flag.  Of the relatively few B2Bs we see that have developed a lead-scoring system, most are simply developed normatively (i.e., a “good” lead “should” look like this, a better one like that, etc.), and are primarily used to guide lead distribution:  to Sales for hot-lead follow-up, to Marketing for nurturing of the rest.  Few if any actually go through the hard work of validating their scoring scheme using actual sales data resulting from leads in the various categories.  To use such a scheme for anything more than a very rough cut at tuning your PPC campaign …well, you may as well just say “this keyphrase (or ad message) should work pretty well, let’s keep it” …but you probably knew that much when you included it in the first place.  So you’re really just telling yourself what you wanted to hear, under cover of some self-generated “data.”

My second comment relates to tails wagging dogs …or in this case, budgets limiting campaign results.  Too often we see good B2B clients struggling under mandated PPC budgets in the $1,000/month range …which gets them maybe 3-5 leads a month, for some big-ticket, highly-considered products or services.  But to get the one or two solid sales leads per month that the CMO probably wants, something more in the range of 100 raw leads/month is needed.  To see how that budget constraint is in fact hindering growth:  if even one of those two solid leads closes, at a modest high-ticket price of $100K and profit margin of 15% (which included the budgeted $1,000), clearly the extra $9K spent to obtain those 2 solid leads (@$100/click) is covered …with room to spare.  If your situation is this good or better (and being sure about it is why the ROI numbers are so vital), then clearly you should be throwing as much money as possible into PPC …until/unless you can come up with a demonstrably higher-leverage marketing tool.

My third point wasn’t mentioned in Terry’s discussion, most likely because no triggering question was asked.  And it’s this:  only about 10% of our B2B clients have an ongoing nurturing email program or an active blog.  This is astonishing… because, quite simply:  any B2B not proactively nurturing their PPC leads with at least one of these two vehicles is mostly wasting whatever they’re spending on PPC.

PPC advertising is one of the most powerful marketing vehicles so far invented.  But too many B2Bs don’t come anywhere close to leveraging it optimally, because they either seriously underfund it (due to not knowing their real return per click) or don’t properly nurture the leads they do get.  And that, friends, is a genuinely sad state of affairs.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy,PPC