Limited by Budget – 5 Ways to Stretch Your B2B Paid Search Budget

by MGB2B

B2B digital marketing is not always an easy job, especially for those of us poor souls who have smaller monthly budgets to work with. When your Google AdWords campaigns are constantly limited by budget, trying to turn web site visitors into leads can seem like a near impossible task. Luckily for you it’s not, and I’ve got 5 pointers to help you stretch those B2B digital marketing dollars in your Google paid search efforts.

1. Campaign Structure – Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Google AdWords allows you to structure your account nearly any way you want. This is great, but can sometimes feel overwhelming. I won’t go into the nitty gritty of ad group and keyword groupings (although I could for hours after a drink or three), so let’s keep it simple and talk about campaign structures.

As the starting point for your AdWords account, your campaigns are where you’ll be setting your daily budgets. So, you structure them in a way where you can put your budget to the most lead generation success. I like to separate general, broad terms, say, from branded or company specific terms in different campaigns. This is so I can set my budgets accordingly depending upon how effective I think each campaign will be at generating leads.

Getting visitors to your website through broader general terms is harder work, and often requires more cash. Setting aside money specifically for that task will allow you to generate some difficult leads without breaking your overall account’s bank.

2. Search Term Reports – Sailing the Seas of Big Data

Odds are that even the best kept paid search accounts are spending some of their valuable budget on searches that are entirely irrelevant, not to mention very unlikely to convert into leads. Combing through your account’s search term reports can be a long and eyeball burning process, but absolutely worth it. You may find that you’re regularly showing up for search terms closely related to your business’s offering which the searcher simply won’t find on your site, and so will never turn into a lead.

Nix out these clicks by adding these terms as negative keywords – a vital practice to ensure you’re using every dollar appropriately, or as appropriately as possible.

3. Dimension Reports – The Whens and Wheres of It All

Another place you may accidentally be wasting some of that budget can be found in your AdWords dimensions reports. Run reports for Geographic/User locations to determine where you’re spending the most and seeing the most conversions. You may find that you can tighten up your campaigns’ location settings and nicely increase your profitability.

The same is true for Day-of-week/Hour-of-day dimension reports. If your business is only open 9 to 5 on weekdays, or only services other companies on that schedule, then you’ll likely find that nighttime and weekend clicks rarely lead to conversions.

If you’re limited by budget, cutting out traffic from these times and places allows you to use your funds where and when you need it the most.

4. Search Impression Share – Sharing Isn’t Always Caring

Sometimes us B2B search marketing folks can forget that each Google search is an auction, which means we’re often sharing space in the search results with our competitors. The problem with campaigns that are regularly limited by budget is that we’re often not being included in every auction we’re eligible for, because we simply don’t have the available funds to afford to pay the cost for them all.

A good way to get a picture of how often your ads are showing in your eligible auctions is to run reports with the included Search Impression columns: “Search Impr. Share,” “Search Lost IS (rank)” and “Search Lost IS (budget)” specifically. In Ad group and Keyword reports, only “Search Impr. Share” and “Search Lost IS (rank)” are available, but you can easily calculate “Search Lost IS (budget)” by subtracting “Search Lost IS (rank)” from “Search Impr. Share.”

These columns let you know how often your ads show up in eligible auctions, and the reasons their not when they don’t. They can point to a campaign that could use more of you allocated budget than another, or can highlight a keyword which could perform better if it only had more available money behind it.

It may be a more advanced method of analysis than you’re used to, but it can really open the doors to using your budget effectively.

5. Decreasing Your Bids for More Clicks – Has the World Turned Upside Down!?

Now I know this is going to sound crazy, and is the opposite of what Google will tell you about how to increase clicks and conversions, but if your campaigns are regularly limited by budget, DECREASING your CPC bids can actually lead to more clicks and conversions. Before you grab your pitchforks, hear me out!

Increasing your CPC bids will increase your ad’s position in the search results, but obviously it will also increase the CPC, the cost you pay for each click. If your campaign has a daily budget of, say, $100 and your CPC bids are set at $2.00 then you can roughly only obtain 50 clicks a day. This will vary by your ad rank, but let’s just keep it simple for the sake of argument. If you decrease your CPC bids to $1.50, then you can obtain an extra 17 clicks a day, without hopefully losing too much position on the search results page.

Those extra clicks will go a long way over time, and could be the key to increasing your leads and lowering your cost per conversion. All things being equal, the more visitors you can bring to your site, the more leads you’re likely to generate. If you can still bring them in at a slightly lower position, then you’re really using your limited budget to its utmost potential, something we can all get behind.

Every B2B search engine marketing specialist wishes they could have more budget to work their advertising magic with, but by following these 5 suggestions you can turn those limited by budget campaigns into lead generation gold!